This week on the blog, I review the wonderful book ‘The Borrowed Boy’ by Deborah Klee. I actually read this book a few weeks ago, but even after moving house and moving onto another couple of reads, this story has stayed with me. Here’s a flavour of the book: Fearing she only has a short time left to live, Angie Winkle feels she hasn’t done much with her life. However, after a chance encounter at a London Underground station, suddenly Angie
This week on the blog, I review the book ‘Heroes of the Shadow: Blue Scar Indeabinito by S.S. Frankowska. This is the author’s first novel. It’s a recent debut, published in February 2021. A flavour of the book This book is an epic portal fantasy that tells the story of Thomas, a soldier living in London. After finding a stray cat, ‘Weirdo’, Thomas unexpectedly finds himself travelling to a different, ancient world. This world is made up of 12 different races,
This week on the blog, I review the book ‘Of Shade and Shadow’ by best friends and sisters-in-law Niamh and Rebecca Schmid. It is their debut novel, published in December 2020. The Plot This fantasy novel starts with a bang a year after a great war has devastated the world. Astra, princess and sister to the king, struggles to recover from dark events and the gift she is not sure how to control. Soon Astra is forced to travel to the
Today’s blog will talk about the real history of Rheged, where my historical fiction series is based. I originally posted this back in 2018, but it didn’t transfer when I set up this new website. When I first wrote it my second novel was in the process of publication and I had just started work on the third. The week before Christmas I finished my second round of major edits on my 3rd historical fiction novel. As I’m now proofreading it
Hey everyone! Hope you’re all keeping safe and well. Today’s blog post contains an exciting update – just today I signed off on the final amendments for my MG (Middle Grade, meaning 9-12 year olds) Fantasy novel, Lottie’s Locket. I’m hoping it might come out in the next couple of months, but I’m just now waiting to hear from Olympia about a provisional publication date. Last week I signed off on the front cover, too – the picture on my left
This week I thought I’d give you a bit more detail about my novel Lottie’s Locket, especially since on Monday 20th I signed a contract with Olympia for them to publish it – rather exciting! Lottie’s Locket is a fantasy/murder mystery for a Middle Grade (MG) audience. MG, broadly speaking, is in between children’s fiction and Young Adult fiction (12-17). I think it will be on the upper end of MG, so my ideal audience would be 10-12 year olds. Here’s
Hi all! After asking for some feedback, it seems people would be interested in hearing about my journey as a writer and bits about the writing process. So today, I thought I’d share with you a common rule of thumb for writers – to ‘show not tell’. Simply put, ‘show not tell’ is about building up a scene in a reader’s imagination. You don’t simply tell someone something, but you allow the reader to experience it for themselves, putting them right