Finding the Wayback

What follows is a series of blog posts written on an ad-hoc basis for the You’re Booked crime writing community website associated with the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival. I started in early 2011, but at some point the site was discontinued, which I only found out last summer, when I was tidying up links on my own website. I learned the hard way to keep local copies of posts, so these have been reconstructed from emails and archive copies and have no associated images or links. A few of the posts had gone completely - I even restored email archives, but found nothing. And really, a Tortoise Crimewave sounded fascinating and I had no idea what the post had originally been about.

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Two for the Price of One!

Tuesday was an unusual day - a first for us. Early start to the day and we were were off to Prestbury in East Cheshire, where Andy gave a talk on the history of stained glass. This is one of his offshoots of Moulton Glass, and he gives short (45 minute) presentations to community groups. Since he's been visiting the local WI groups, word has got out and he's now being contacted by the National Women's Register, Probus and the U3A. He's a good speaker and people seem to enjoy listening.

Then later on in the afternoon, it was my turn. Northwich's new local bookshop Cover2Cover invited me to host a talk about my books and writing - there are a number of us local authors and there have been and will be more. So I took wine (of course) and some cakey nibbles, packed up some examples of my books and headed off for an hour and a half of talking about myself!

I've done numerous talks, panels and readings - both alone and as part of a group. I've even been paid to lead writing workshops (and that's a story in itself0. But the imposter syndrome doesn't go away - in fact if anything it gets worse as I get older. Despite having a respectable back-catalogue now, there's still that apprehension. The what if nobody turns up to my party nerves.

But it went well. People turned up, didn't pass out from boredom and I even sold a few books!

When Soap was Squeaky Clean

I was born in 1964, so most of my supposedly formative years were in the 1970s and 1980s. I remember our family having the first colour television on the street – hired from Radio Rentals as were they all back then. I remember having just three TV channels and the excitement of the launch of Channel 4 in 1982. I also remember the launch of Brookside, the new hard-hitting Channel 4 soap set in Liverpool. I’d just started at Liverpool university and if you got up early enough at university, you could watch them filming in the city. 

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