📽 If you have not seen this film, drop whatever you are doing and book tickets now. It has been nominated for ten Oscars and if it doesn’t sweep the board, call me Jemima and paint me cerise. It is quite extraordinary: classy, funny, bawdy, violent, heartbreaking – and very very strange. Deadly Rivals It…

Before I became a full time writer I taught at Lincoln Minster School for many years. Just before Christmas I went back to see a scintillating performance of a favourite play of mine. Here is my review: Rostand’s play, Cyrano de Bergerac, is a pyrotechnic affair, exploding everywhere with wit, wordplay, [s]wordplay, fencing with foils…

During the course of the year, I have, from time to time, offered up my opinions on Facebook and other social media about books, films and plays which I’ve enjoyed – or not. I find these swift thumbnails helpful in keeping my own critical faculties sharp, but I also hope they offer suggestions to friends…

  I don’t know what other writers feel when they are asked this perfectly fair and reasonable question. I tend to have a version of the blurb available in my mind when I try to reply, a bit about how the book came about, and whether its genre is ‘tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, historical-pastoral, etc, etc.’, to abbreviate…

My collection of short stories, Cherries, is making its way into the world. Humphrey and Jack, my second novel, will be launched in the New Year. Time for some reading and a couple of reviews. Today, it is the turn of the notorious emperor, Caligula by the prolific Simon Turney.

My current work in progress is a selection of short stories to be called simply Cherries. I am busy curating these tales (as the current fashionable jargon has it – though ‘curate’ is the mot juste here) whilst my second novel, Humphrey & Jack, is with my editor. Which will appear first is anybody’s guess…

“Who is ‘The Countess’?” is the novel’s smouldering conundrum and it is never fully answered until the surprising and delightful last pages, and perhaps not even then. The fact that she is an enigma until almost the end is what propels the action – though, when I say ‘action’, there are periods of seeming inertia…

After twenty-five consecutive days of work, weekends included, and four meticulous edits, Humphrey and Jack is ready to go off to my editor. I look forward to some beers and a meal with him in London on Friday. I have managed to reduce the draft by two and a half thousand words, some of which…

At 11.42 hours this morning, I completed the first draft of Humphrey and Jack. It is a good feeling. I have been working on it now for a year and twenty-one days. Ahead lie many more days of gruelling editing. But for now, I am enjoying a pint. I don’t know how long it is….