Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale

13 Jul

As it’s about halfway through July already, I should probably mention that throughout July my books are available for free at Smashwords, the e-book publisher-cum-shop. That doesn’t include all of the books I’ve written, but there are five available on Smashwords, including the perennial favourites Leda (shortlisted for the Scripture Union New Fiction Prize) and Office Life (and Death), a short story collection that includes the prize-winning story “A Recipe for Summer”.

The front page of Smashwords is dominated by raunchy ‘romance’ novels with half-naked muscly men on the covers (Who buys all that stuff? It’s really not my jam.) so you might want to go straight to my profile page instead. Or check out all the books in the sale (gazillions) and pick your way through the forest of shiny flesh.

(By the way, Smashwords is not confused about what time of year it is, it’s just that they have customers all over the world, so the summer sale to Brits is the winter sale to Australians.)

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Make a little birdhouse in your soul

22 Jun

Although it pales in comparison to all the other horror and tragedy in the world, I had a little loss of my own this week. My budgie Roland died at the not very advanced age of four years. He had been sick for a while with what turned out out to be a liver complaint and died at the weekend, whether from the liver problem or from the stress of being medicated for the liver problem, who can say? (Death from stress is a common problem with birds and small animals in general – apparently the trick is to get them happy taking fluid from a syringe before they ever get ill. Something to remember for next time.) But this is not a sad post – I thought this was a good time to introduce you to the birds who have shared my life. They each had their own unique personality and colouring, kept me company in lonely times and cheered up the house. You can keep your cats and dogs; give me a bird any day.

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Pop-Up Submission Success

31 May

Ages ago I submitted my novel The Gates of Janus to Litopia’s Pop-Up Submissions, and yesterday it was finally included in their live YouTube show. The useful but terrifying idea is that you get to hear what literary agents and the like think about your submission, rather than just guessing when they send you a generic “not quite right for us” response. I have had many of those responses for The Gates of Janus so I thought this might be helpful – but I didn’t tell anyone ahead of time because I was afraid they would tear it to pieces!

Anyway, they didn’t tear it to pieces. In fact, it did rather well, so now I am telling you about it. You can see the whole episode here, and this link should take you to where my bit starts (my entry was last).

In a sense it’s unhelpful that GoJ did so well, because it doesn’t uncover the mystery of why it has been rejected so many times. However, it does give me the encouragement to go out and get it a few more rejections rather than giving up! Encouragement is something writers badly need, after all.

If you have your own project that you would like to hear literary types discuss then you can apply for Pop-Up Submissions yourself, although there is a significant wait. But what else are you going to do during the pandemic? Alternatively, if you have no idea how this whole submission thing works, then you can read my wee book How to Get Published, which is available free if you sign up to my extremely infrequent newsletter.

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Ugly East Kilbride

30 Apr

Before you get too annoyed, please note that this is a twin post. You can find the other one here.

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Beautiful East Kilbride

30 Apr

Before you get too confused, please note that this is a twin post. You can find the other one here.

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Karen 2.0

5 Apr

At the moment I am reading a book called Mini Habits by Stephen Guise. Actually, I’m reading a lot of books at the moment, because I always read multiple books (it’s like being able to select which chocolate you most want to eat now from a carefully curated box) but I want to tell you about Mini Habits.

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St Patrick in his World

15 Mar

Just in case you think I’ve been slacking off during this neverending lockdown, I’ll have you know that I am busy preparing a talk on St Patrick – and you are all invited!

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A Tale of Three Rebeccas

16 Feb

Over the last few months, I have watched three different film versions of Rebecca, and read the book. This sounds like an obsession, but I assure you it’s not. It began innocently enough with my sister, my brother-in-law and myself all watching the new version of Rebecca, with Armie Hammer. (And as I check the spelling of his name online, I notice that some kind of scandal regarding him has just broken. I am accidentally topical, as ever. Also, I notice that his real name is Armand. If I was called Armand, I would not go around asking people to address me as Armie. But I digress.)

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My prescription for lockdown

25 Jan

There was much hilarity at the Glasgow Esperanto Club this month. We were using Gather (an odd little meetup platform with very ’90s graphics) to play the ‘Secret Rule’ game, and the secret rule was that everyone had to laugh whenever Peter’s hand(s) were in shot. Although the laughter started off artificial, it soon became real when poor Peter was sitting with his hands clearly visible on top of his despairing head saying that he just couldn’t work it out. There is something very funny about a group of people who are not allowed to stop laughing, while someone else has no idea why.

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My year in review – 2020

31 Dec

It seems redundant to say that this year has not been what I expected. Unless you’ve been living in an isolated Amazon tribe (in which case I’d love to know how you’re reading this) you already know that 2020 was the year that said ‘no’. If you want to read about my experiences of the first lockdown, click the link. This winter lockdown feels much less new and exciting and much more of a dull, dark slog. However, life goes on regardless, so I will give you a quick review of my year as a whole.

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