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Latest NewsYes, yes, yes, I know, it's been months since my last confession. No good reason for that, apart from having spent far too long writing book three, as well as organising a tour for Hazard Warning, spending five weeks travelling through Canada and zipping all over the place doing talks and readings. It's been a lot of fun, but more about that later. Book three is finally finished, and I'm pretty pleased with how it's turned out. The working title is The Chameleons, but that may well change. It's written in a very different voice to the previous two, which I've really enjoyed developing. Part of the reason it's taken so long to write is that a lot of the tension and suspense in Death Duty comes from the jeopardy that the central character finds herself in, and the effect that her fear has on her thoughts and behaviour, but I didn't want to write about this again so I had to find a new way of creating suspense and tension. I think it's worked reasonably well - it'll be interesting to see what readers think. I don't know when it will be published yet, but I'll let you know when I do! The other big news is Hazard Warning. We're now officially a 'collaborative writing and performance group', and Rod Duncan, Sally Spedding and I have spent a lot of time setting everything up, but it certainly seems to have been worthwhile. We applied for a grant from Arts Council England (and just writing the proposal involved masses of emails and phone calls and even a few actual meetings, which is no small thing as Nottingham, Leicester and Northampton are not exactly next door to each other!) The grant was to run a tour (which, as we planned to step outside the East Midlands two or three times, counted as a 'national tour'), taking the event to different venues and audiences, and to create publicity materials such as leaflets and a website, to enable us to continue the collaboration after the end of the tour. Luckily, the Arts Council seemed to think it was as good an idea as we did, and gave us the grant, so we've been busy on our tour since then. But you can go to the Hazard Warning website if you're desperate for further information! It's been a year of events, really. Apart from Bouchercon, which I'm going to say more about in a separate 'what I did on my holidays' account of my epic 5-week journey across and around Canada (to follow soon, folks, I promise!), I also attended the St Hilda's Mystery Conference at St Hilda's College in Oxford. A beautiful setting for all the usual mayhem of these kinds of gatherings! Though it's far from the usual sort of conference, not least because the writers who give talks don't talk about their own writing. We had talks on all manner of subjects, from the history of Lesbian crime writing to the works of John Le Carre, and a punting competition on the river, and all sorts of merriment. I met some wonderful people there and recommend it highly - you can find out about this year's conference at the Mystery Women website. I also had a trip back to the old home town - Bedford - one of those strange things where you feel like you've stepped into your own past. I went back to my old school, Mark Rutherford Upper School, and did a speech at the Awards Ceremony. Plenty of my old teachers were still there, and it was most peculiar to walk through those corridors again, but it all seemed to go well. They laughed in all the right places when I talked and applauded when I'd finished, anyway. I met a couple of students who write, and it was great to be able to offer them the kind of encouragement I would have really cherished myself. So now it's 2005, and a whole new year is ahead of us. I'm hoping I have as much fun this year as I did last - and of course, I hope the same for all of you! |
