Baz Baron

Wow. Thank you Janette, I’d relaxed, confident of having been entertainingly pipped at the post. Will drag myself from editing and see what I can come up with.

Rose the Cat

One day when I was seven, my sister Rose turned into a cat. I expected it because Rose had said ‘You won’t catch me here much longer. Not like this.’ Mr Cobden, the old man at the end of the road next to where the people had little walls all over their garden that my mum said were ‘common’, said to us that we would both live long…[Read more]

Transformation

It’s easy to transform. You just change, from one state to
Another. Nothing much to worry
About. Examples are (quite literally) everywhere you
Look. Consider the universe. Just
Took the universe a picosecond to drag itself
Out of an incomprehensible
Mess, shrugging on the laws of physics, sorting
Its chaotic nature into f…[Read more]

Thank you Jane – and Kate and Raine – it’s always good to get positive feedback, and Carol’s was more incisive that I could have managed. (I’m still grinning)

If anyone is wondering about splashing out on a print version of any of the ‘Love triangles with murder’ series, Blurb has a SHIP4FREE offer – at their usual rate of £6.99 for one book this is of considerable value, but offer ends 30th March

h t t p s://w w w.blurb.co.uk/user/SandraDavies…
Use the code SHIP4FREE

Thanks, Ath. I bought a copy of Carol’s novel, but as it only arrived yesterday I haven’t begun it yet.

What a brilliant review. I hope this generates some activity/interest/sales!

Incidentally, I see that Carol McKay wrote a pandemic novel that just beat the actual pandemic to publication, as did Kimmery Martin and Lawrence Wright. But they got splashed all over the papers and radio for it. Not a fair world.

This is fab, Sandra. Congratulations.

Wow, that’s not far from me at all. Half an hour by car. A pilgrimmage might be in order

@bellam, perhaps you can help me. I remember as a child hearing about a pirate radio ship that had been caught in a storm and had to put into Harwich, when it was impounded. I was there with my Mum and she pointed it out to me. I just remember a small, red ship. This was in the mid 1980s. I can’t find any references to it. I know we still had…[Read more]

Lovely, elegiac blog, Richard. I don’t think I realised how hard it could be to access pop music, especially anything out of the mainstream, until the late 60s.

As you know, Fairport is one of my favourite bands as well. I’d never heard the live version of Percy’s Song but just listened to it, and I know what you mean – both versions have…[Read more]

Interesting to see this pop up again – thanks for those podcasts Libby, looks interesting – and it has sort of kicked a thought into the foreground.

As a writer, my books *are* me (when it comes to fiction, that is). They are fragments of my being that I have extracted and slapped down on paper. I find it impossible to conceive of someone who…[Read more]

Publishers vary a lot in terms of the extent they will consult and take account of author suggestions. Mine have ranged from asking me for examples of covers I like and making changes to the design at my behest, to not even showing me the cover until the book is published. In the middle was making some changes to a first iteration, showing a…[Read more]

With crime fiction, it seems that the ‘THIS IS WHAT THIS IS signifier is a silhouetted man walking down a tunnel or over a bridge or along a lonely road BUT IT IS ALWAYS THE SAME BLINKING MAN!!! and I wonder authors don’t put their foot down. Even more so when I see what can be done by a small company with ‘This is our undoing’