A couloir is a steep, narrow gully on a mountainside. It’s also a marvellous excuse to post yet another picture from my Scotland trips (only 7,346 to go and you’ll have seen them all)
It might not actually be of a couloir, but it’s definitely a mountainside. Or a hill. Anyway, there was steepness involved.
This is the cover for the third book in my Little Mallow cosy mystery series. It will be available early next year. If you’d like to receive a free review copy a couple of weeks before the official release, please get in touch
My short story collection Keep It In The Family, is currently free to download. Offer ends 7th December. I hope you enjoy it. If you do, a review will be greatly appreciated.
Here’s the blurb –
Alec thinks he’s suffered a medical emergency, Dr Kuttemopen says the same about his patient, and Jake and his granddad will be at risk from one if they carry on as they’ve been doing. With the support of loved ones, they could all put these predicted and suspected health problems behind them. Uncle Boris’s condition will never go away, but neither will Aunt Jonna, so he’ll not just cope, but enjoy doing so.
Everyone has problems or concerns from time to time. Some deal with them by always moving on and never looking back, others by asking the right question. They might try to keep them hidden, insist on bringing them into the open, or allow the sea to wash them away. Most will turn to their families for help, but all Miss Frencham’s are gone. All she can do, is tell people about the bodies.
Anne’s spent a lot of time waiting for her daughter; a whole lifetime, but it’s been worth every second. Daniel’s mother and Dizzy’s father-in-law won’t wait a moment for them, until they come to their senses and reunite their families. Stephanie’s waiting for the right kind of snow, and Adam’s waiting for the wrong sort of Santa. Their reward will be to know they did the right thing.
Families, whether we’re born or married into them, or choose them for ourselves all have stories to tell. This collection contains 25 of them.
A gaff can be either one of two horrible sounding fishing implements, or a slang term for a person’s home. Gaff can also mean a plan or secret, most often used in the phrase ‘don’t blow the gaff‘ which is similar to not letting the cat out of the bag. (English is fun, isn’t it?)
Don’t make the gaffe of adding an e – that’s a different word.
Threave castle was once the gaff of Archibald the grim. (Upsetting him was way more than a gaffe)
I wonder if he used a gaff to catch fish in his moat?
Quadrifid means to have four divisions or lobes. This akebia quinata has three parts to the flowers and five to the leaves – so that averages out right.
I don’t use AI to write my books. My readers are real people and I don’t think it’s fair to ask them to buy a book and spend time reading it if I can’t be bothered to write it myself.
If you’d like to read any of my novels or themed short story collections, you can request them from libraries, order through bookshops, or buy them here.
This book is ‘Display of Heraldry’ which was published in 1660.
Back then it was only the very rich who could afford books (the kind of people who had heraldry to display). It wasn’t uncommon for workers, even skilled ones to be illiterate. You can imagine this had to potential to cause problems when some of those skilled workers had the job of binding individual pages into a book.
To ensure the pages were stitched together in the right order a catchword was used. The last word at the end of a page would be repeated at the start of the next. This meant that even those who couldn’t read the text could match up these two words and avoid expensive errors.
I attended a book fair yesterday. 
It had been hoped some of the authors could give readings of their work. Unfortunately the acoustics in the building made that impossible.
As I’d printed out my story and nerved myself up to do it, I decided to have a go at home. It’s actually much harder to talk to a camera than real people especially when, without your glasses, you can’t see whether the thing is on or not! (I can’t read them on, just in case you were thinking I’d overlooked an obvious solution to the problem, which admittedly I sometimes do.)
Here’s the result. The story, Judged to Perfection makes up part of the free download offered when you sign up to my newsletter.
I
‘m attending a book fair on Sunday (if you’re in Portsmouth, please come and say hello – it’s free entry and there’s a cafe selling cakes).
That means I need some books to sell, and I therefore ordered some. Feeling pleased with myself for having remembered to do it in time for me to unpack and check them prior to the day I got a little bit carried away and decided to make an ‘unboxing’ video. I’m not sure when or why these became a trend, but from the ones I’d seen I had the impression it was an easy thing to do. I’m less sure about that now! Click here’s to see the result. I hope it makes you smile.
A while ago I wanted a one word alternative to ‘only child’ and discovered monogene. The word isn’t in my dictionary and doesn’t seem to have one clear definition, but being the only begotten child is one alternative. It can also mean unique, special and one of a kind.
Much as I love my brother now, there were times whilst growing up when I’d have preferred to be a monogene. (I can’t give examples as he’s got as much on me as I have on him!)
Monogenesis is in my dictionary. It refers to the theory that all living things developed from a single cell. Apparently it was a bacteria like thingamy*. Monogeny is an alternative term as is monogenetics.
*sorry for the technical jargon!