Kitchen clear out

I spent a very inspiring week away at B3Media's Talentlab for artists, a very packed, intense course full of new ideas and advice, and a chance to hear about the journeys of other creative people. Hopefully I'll be able to use some of what I learnt in my own work soon.

Meanwhile, I've been tidying up, and am planning to do a bit of decorating. I started with re-organising the kitchen. Here are the newly tidied drawer and shelves...

Things I've been up to...

A few little exciting things have happened since I last wrote on here. My first novel, The Secret Arts, has been published as an e-book by Dean Street Press. It's a mystery with a bit of humour, set in a small Pakistani town, and is the story of a young woman, Saika, who marries a widowed colonel. Soon she starts hearing rumours about the strange death of his first wife, and begins to unravel the the truth about what really happened. Meanwhile, other members of the family are busy practising black magic and plotting revenge, and then one of them is murdered... 

It's available for download for Kindle, Googleplay and all your other gadgets here.

My monologue for Kali Theatre's Twelve project was performed last week in London and Birmingham. Conceived by Kali's artistic director Janet Steel, the piece brought together twelve women to write monologues based on the subject of honour killings and forced marriages, the significance of "twelve" being that this is the average number of women killed in a year as a result of honour based violence. It was wonderful and inspiring to work with so many talented writers and you can read about the performance here. 

A last bit of surprising news- I won the New Perspectives Long Play Competition! The play's called Vampire in Bradford and I'm really looking forward to developing it further with New Perspectives.

Books

Here are a couple of the books I've read recently. Coincidentally, both are set in boarding schools. "Last to Die" by Tess Gerritsen, features Rizzoli and Isles, the detective and the doctor. It revolves around a series of murders in which children are orphaned when their families are killed. The children are taken to a secret school, a former castle located deep inside a forest, where they will hopefully be kept safe. It's a fast paced, easy, suspenseful book, though perhaps not as good as some of Gerritsen's other novels.

I picked up Helen McCloy's "Through a Glass Darkly" at the British Library's crime exhibition a few months ago, along with two others from the Arcturus Crime Classics series. The mystery takes place in a girl's boarding school, where a young teacher, Faustina Coyle, is forced to resign when she seems to be the catalyst for several strange, inexplicable occurrences. Her friend, Gisela asks her fiance, Basil Willing, to investigate.

I really enjoyed this. It's a psychological suspense novel, but what I especially liked was the way it explored some of the weird, unexplained aspects of the subject, and the disturbing, creepy atmosphere of the book. It's a shame there's not much more of Helen McCloy's work available.

Love the retro, sort of Pop Arty cover!

Autumn

Autumn morning.

Hello

I was a bit doubtful about doing this- do I have enough interesting things to write? Hmmm. We'll, see I suppose. Maybe I should start with a nice picture? Here are some pretty glasses I bought a few days ago, one of my favourite colour combinations, that, coincidentally, match with our kitchen stools.