Researching – how to behave

Two years ago, I wrote a post on research, setting out five steps to getting a best result. During the past two weeks, I’ve been following that same methodology to assess service suppliers and have narrowed my search to two possibilities.

I googled then sifted the results, gathered reports, opinions, financial data (from the sycophantic […]

Finis - the end of the story

I didn’t know I’d feel so bereft. Now I’ve done the first run edits on fiction Book 3, the last in the trilogy, I’ve finished my heroine’s story. No, really finished. After the relief of completing the red-pen exercise, sadness crept up on me and now has me in its grip.

I’ve lived with my […]

Sobering thoughts and rebalancing

Ten days ago, my mother-in-law died. Born in 1929 in a working class family in Birkenhead, she’d lived a modest childhood, endured separation from her parents and siblings as an evacuee during wartime, returned to a bombed-out city, married, had a child at the start of the space race and witnessed the technological age from […]

An itch coupled with an opportunity

Since I published my first book, a non-fiction title called Military or Civilians? The curious anomaly of the German Women’s Auxiliary Services during the Second World War on Amazon last Wednesday quite a few people have asked me why I did it.

Comments have included: “I thought you wrote alternate history thrillers with a Roman […]

Writers’ locations or does the earth move for you?

I stood on the rounded road stones, warmed by spring sunshine under a deep blue sky, and gazed up the road as it rose to the horizon. Red-tiled and grey stone shop fronts each side of the road. I steadied my breath, shut my eyes and heard the noises of nineteen hundred years ago.

This […]