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New year, new look!
January 6, 2015
I have to admit I’m not a big fan of this time of year – for the whole of January I can usually be found at my desk grumbling to myself, wearing five jumpers, fingerless gloves, clutching a hot water bottle, dosed up on Day Nurse, coffee and leftover Quality Street. But at least this year I have the excitement of seeing the beautiful new paperback of The Year of The Rat in bookshops to see me through the dark, austere days of January…
To celebrate the publication of the new look paperback I’m doing a blog tour all this week, talking about The Year of The Rat, what I’m writing next, and different aspects of the writing process. You can click on the image below to see more details:
I’ve also written a piece for The Guardian website arguing that the labels we apply to books are not always helpful. Would we think of The Secret Garden the same way if it was labelled as ‘Sick Lit’, Pride and Prejudice if it was ‘Chick Lit’ or Macbeth if it was ‘Fantasy’? Do you need to be told who a book is for? Does it necessarily have anything much in common with other books addressing similar themes? Who decides what the defining feature of a book is? You can read the whole article here:
Finally I’ve written a blog for the Waterstones website about the joys and pitfalls of researching your novel, which you can find here:
And talking of how important it is not to get sidetracked while you’re trying to write your novel, what I really need to do is go and finish my next book! If I can manage that then January really will start to look a bit brighter.