Welcome

Hello – welcome to my new website. I hope you’ll like it. I hope you’ll poke around and read the extract from VIII and watch the videos, and maybe tell me what you think.

I’m going to try to update this blog as often as I can, to let you know what I’m up to, and to pass on any interesting information that comes my way. At the moment I’m busy planning events for the autumn, surrounding the publication of VIII on October 1st. Exciting. And scary. This book has dominated my life for the last two years or more… but now it’s time to set it on the water and see if it’ll sail. It’s a very curious feeling – of letting go, and at the same time of an entirely different sort of engagement. With the outside world. Yikes.

Today I had a meeting – that sounds too formal, it was a really enjoyable chat – with Margaret Pemberton, a lovely & very important person from the Schools Library Service. Amongst many other things, we talked about books we had loved as children, and how they had kindled our enthusiasm for history. I mentioned ‘When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit’ by Judith Kerr and Margaret mentioned ‘Knight Crusader’ by Ronald Welch (which I must find and read). Some books are enjoyed, and you move on. Others lodge with you permanently. That’s something I’d like to explore in a future blog.

For now, I just wanted to say that this isn’t my only blog. I’m writing as one of The History Girls too – it’s a joint venture involving 28 writers of historical fiction for Junior, YA and adult readers. It’s fantastic (which I’m allowed to say because I’m such a small part of it). Each person has their own regular date and thus each day you can read a piece by someone different. The posts have been so great that it’s the first thing I read every morning – I know I could be accused of bias but, hey, take a look if you don’t believe me (just click on the name above).

My regular date there is the 12th, and my first post was about the creative process that led to the writing of VIII. It’s called ‘Sitting in my soup’ and you can read it here. For the moment that’s the blog where you’ll find longer pieces from me – on this one, I’m going to post news, updates and thoughts. More soon…