Throwing a sickie

And breathe…! Or not.

Well, I’ve been having some difficulty doing this over the past fortnight. I flew home from the highly energising Dublin Writers’ Conference with a raging sore throat and feeling like a superannuated wet dishcloth. The tiredness could have been due to the conference (it was fairly intense), but the sore throat […]

Speculative heroines

Some reflections for International Women’s Day…

All fictional characters are, er, fictional. We borrow, mine, or lift characteristics from Real Life, but unless we want to get sued, the finally moulded form is a construct. We can gender mirror (I love using that expression – also made up), we can speculate, we can imagine.

Ditto […]

A writing hiatus

Alison not quite cross-eyed

You may have thought I’d disappeared.

No, apart from squeezing in some writing and finalising edits with my copy editor, I was just publishing and launching a new book.

“Just publishing and launching” doesn’t quite describe it.

Let me show you…

Target RETALIO publication date: 27 April 2017

Mid […]

What the OU did for me and history

David Puttnam congratulating me at the degree ceremony

Study can broaden, widen and enrich your mind – that was a good enough reason for me when I signed up to do an MA in history with the Open University. I’d had to leave studying history at school because it clashed with Latin. (Who […]

Meet Jane Davis, genius at 'made-up truth'

Today, I am a little awed at welcoming Jane Davis to my writing blog. To say she’s a writer is a bit of an understatement.

Jane spent her twenties and the first part of her thirties chasing promotions at work, but when she achieved what she’d set out to do, she discovered that it […]