It’s been a while – I am sure your lives have been rolling along absolutely fine – lockdowns permitting – without my weekly or fortnightly musings on matters vaguely writerly or readerly – but a lot has been happening behind the scenes and now I am able to blog again on my newly designed website and introduce you to a few new features.

For a start, there’s my splendid logo revealed today for the very first time! Hope you like it. Then, if you take a tour around the new website, you will see that in future, readers will be able to buy books direct from me rather than going via Amazon, my publisher, high street book stores – although those outlets are still, of course, available. The advantage of buying direct from the website is that each copy will arrive in the post – or be delivered by hand if local – with additional treats such as book marks, a short story, postcards, some flash fiction or whatever the give-away of the month happens to be. Something for free, in other words!

And pre-ordering my next novel is also available.

MILLER STREET SW22 has just gone through the final proof reading stage post typesetting, cover image and design approved – more of that in my next blog – and now there is little I can do, but wait for the first copies to reach me around February 2021. The official release date and the first day when the novel will be available from bookshops and Amazon and all other online outlets is April 28th 2021 – but ordering through my website will bring a copy to your front door some two months ahead of that date!

It is terrifying ‘letting go’ of the manuscript – sending it off in what will now be its completed form. Always there’s the need to improve, to go back, cut, re-write, change words, sequences – and setting that urge aside is very hard. But I’ve now abandoned my family of characters in MILLER STREET SW22 to their own fate – it really does feel a little like waving goodbye to one’s precious child at the school gate for the first time!

News on THE LEGACY OF MR JARVIS – in January, YOURS magazine is offering 25 copies of my second novel as competition prizes – all you have to do, evidently, is turn to page 103 of the fortnightly magazine – January 12th edition – for information, fill in a coupon or apply online for the giveaway and a copy of MR JARVIS could be with you within days – absolutely for free. What’s not to like!

And just before I go – with a reference to one of my earlier blogs on the hazards of mask-wearing – yesterday I experienced a new mask low – on a very wet day in London when the rain failed to let up for a single second, masks, I discovered, get very wet too. And wearing a wet mask on a bleak day in winter is even worse, I assure you, than sporting a clammy warm one in the heat of mid summer!