This week I spend a wonderful couple of hours spending a birthday gift voucher in Waterstones, Truro, I felt familiar excitement as I breathed in the scent of books from the doorway. As always I viewed the laden tables in dizzy wonder. So many books, so many writers, so many stories. So …
Is it just me who finds the ending of many recent crime novels totally implausible? It is so disappointing to be gripped throughout a book and then, in the last chapter, the main character, bewilderingly, bizarrely and deliberately puts herself slap bang into the danger she has been fleeing from for the whole …
August Blog Penzance held its Literary Festival in July. For a few days the streets and parks were full of people happily wandering between events, listening to visiting writers and poets and steadfastly supporting local writers. Writing workshops for aspiring authors of all ages and numerous children’s events were a great success. None of this …
Outside the rain is lashing against the windows. The sea through the rooftops is white capped and irritable. A small tanker is holed up in the lea of the land. My latest book is finished and with an editor. Now I must wait Winter has been ferocious, endless, sodden and here we are longing and …
December 2013 Idle thoughts at the closing of the Year Recently, I went to stay for two weeks in a small fishing village in West Cornwall to dog-sit for a friend. Her house perched high up on the cliff-like hillside. Huge windows brought the views inside so that I perched out over a vast expanse …
I am spending a wonderful, isolated, dog sitting, editing week in Mousehole in a house set above the sea. Writer’s bliss.
I sit facing the mountains as early sun heats my skin. There is a nest of sparrows at the top of one of the palms outside my bedroom window. The house lies in a valley of lemon and apricot orchards. Fat yellow lemons, impossibly seductive lie amid green branches and on the dry ground. …
This was the sight I woke to last Sunday while staying with a friend in Marazion.
As I write great goblets of rain are hitting the windows sideways in a ferocious gale, gusting around the house, finding every crack, filling the house with cold air and rattling the windows. The sea across the rooftops has disappeared into a matching grey sky. Yet in the garden my clematis Montana is beginning to …
After a huge storm with the wind wuthering around the house all night and tearing the shed door open and getting into every crack the day dawned in silence and beautiful light. People gathered with cameras and mobile phones to take the unusual sight of waves screaming into shore meeting those backing out and hitting …