So, it's festival time again. That makes me sound like an old hand, which would hardly be true. Having said that, if a festival and publisher have paid for you to fly halfway round the world, they get their money's worth, and in ten days in New Zealand and Australia I did something like five festival sessions complete with post-session gallop down to the bookshop tent to sign things, as well as TV, radio, press, a couple of photos. I've a nasty feeling that real authors are supposed to hate it, to be such tender plants or introverts that standing up in public is agony, or at least to regard it as a terrible waste of good writing time. I'm obviously not a real author, because I enjoy it enormously. Yes, it's more fun talking to 200 festival goers with the Australian sun beaming down outside the marquee, than it is signing 2½ books on a wet Saturday lunchtime that happens to coincide with a European Cup match, but it's still fun. And yes, the actual hour on the platform isn't a waste of good writing time - you could say that it is writing time, if writing is communicating to readers.

What still surprises me is how long I take to get my normal, concentrated, tunnel-visioned, misanthropic, writer's balance back afterwards, and that does often feel like a waste of time. Like a grumpy eight year old, I don't want it to be Monday, or not my birthday, or not Christmas. I scull around the house, a spoilt brat whose audience has left...

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There’s more to writing than prose, and I wonder if you’ve ever considered writing for screen? I found my feet as a writer with some classes in scriptwriting conducted by a lovely guy called Jon Wood, whose career has been all about creating plays for children. It turns out that I was one of them, way back when, and now he was my mentor as an adult.

Jon’s classes were an opportunity to test out concepts and scenes with an audience of other writers, and even by reading out scenes ourselves we got to learn a lot about pace, dialogue, and character. Sometimes we had the luxury of acting students performing what we’d done, script in hand, and that moved the whole process up a notch...



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It's not been a great few months, in fact this year started pretty badly, with illness and anxiety etc..., and has only got slightly better since now I have a space to write and the energy to actually do it, some of the time.

I was quite upset last week to discover, checking my book's Amazon page, that there was a negative review. Welcome to the real world! I hadn't yet experienced someone talking the time and effort to tell people what he didn't like about The White Road and Other Stories. Already not feeling so strong, I took it quite hard, all those initial urges to just burn every copy and disappear into a small hole. It took the help of a number of author friends, some with far worse experiences to share, to get me to calm down and see that the fact that he wrote at the end of the review " after the hype on the internet and in New Scientist, I was expecting something special" is a good thing - it means there was hype!

Ok, so, this morning's post brought me something to make my day a little brighter.

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It is with great pleasure that I welcome poet, novelist and all round lovely lady, Fiona Robyn to my blog, for the latest stage on her blog tour in support of her debut, The Letters.

So, let's get going...


The Letters, Fiona, who’s it for and what’s it about?

The Letters tells the story of workaholic divorcee Violet who leaves her old life behind to go and live by the sea, where she starts receiving mysterious letters written by a girl in a mother and baby home in 1959. This novel happens to have female lead characters and so may appeal more to women, but that was never my intention - it depends if male readers are comfortable enough with their masculinity to be seen reading it in public!



Do letters play a significant part in your life?

They used to – I had a good pen friend from the age of 13 until we were 20, but we tend to meet up instead these days. Email certainly plays a significant part, and some of my emails are longer ‘letter-like’ ones. I feel very comfortable writing my thoughts down and use journals a lot. But there’s nothing like a face to face chat with coffee with cake.

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'No, no! ' He laughed at my literal-mindedness and poor grasp of council-speak. 'Affordable' doesn't mean that. It's the recognised term for 'social housing''.

'Social housing. Do you mean council houses?'

He winced again at the obsolete terminology. 'Housing Associations.'


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Well, my daughter has had a very good weekend. Supported, but not 'pushed' by my husband and I, she first passed her prelimary LAMDA (London School of Music and Dramatic Arts) exam with merit and then finished the last day of her workshop with excellent reviews and a visit from a casting director. At only 8 years old I am so proud of her. She absolutely loves to act and dance but being such an expensive hobby she is gradually draining her father and I dry of our money. I bet she graduates school and becomes a secretary!

Being something of a closet geek (yes, I was the one in your class who actually liked maths), I always rather enjoy it when the newspapers run stories based on maths or statistics.


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I'm reading, and utterly loving, Slaughterhouse 5 at the moment. But here's the thing - it isn't just the words and story I love. It's the typeface, the cover, the feel of the book, its weight, its texture, its size. I felt the same about Willful Creatures, by Aimee Bender (seriously, I stroked that book!) among a few others

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True story :
A friend of a friend goes to a posh dinner party.
‘And what do you do?’ the hostess asks her.
‘I don’t do anything,’ the friend says. ‘I’m just myself.’
‘Well,’ says the hostess, ‘That’s not good enough!’

Apocryphal story:
A dinner party guest asks the writer what he does for a living.
‘I’m a writer,’ he says.
‘Oh really?’ says the guest. ‘I’m going to write a book when I retire.’
‘What do you do?’ asks the writer.
‘Brain surgeon.’
‘Funny, that,’ says the writer. ‘I’m going to take up brain surgery when I retire.’

Such stories put me in mind of all the times when I’ve been asked what I ‘do’ - the added implication being ‘for a living’. Conversations usually run along the following lines:


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It seemed a party was just getting started. In the entance hall, popular music of the forties was playing on a gramophone. Women drifted about in frocks, hats and red lipstick. A Fred Astaire/Judy Garland film was showing on a twenty foot screen.

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