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Responses to Some Questions from a Book Group
Warning – contains spoilers. The reading group at the Book Corner independent bookshop in Saltburn on Sea recently read and discussed Finer Things. These are the questions they sent me – and my answers. Where did you get your inspiration for the story from? I’d just finished my first attempt at a novel – written…
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Westcotes Homeless People’s Reading Group, Leicester
Professor Bob Usherwood of the University of Sheffield recently asked me for a brief account of my visit to the Westcotes group, which he could include in an article for Information Professional – the Library and Information Organisation’s magazine. This is an adapted version of the email I sent him. As a novelist, I’m a…
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My novel in eleven stops
The weekend before last, at the suggestion of my publisher I took a tour around London, for the benefit of social media, visiting places that appear in Finer Things. There were several problems associated with this challenge. Most significantly, not everywhere in the book actually exists. Still, I did manage, sometimes on foot, sometimes by…
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Book Launch
You might assume that, as the sort of person who can happily devote hundreds of hours to sitting alone in a room making up stories, I’m unlikely to have much of the extrovert in me. Well, I don’t know if that’s just a stereotype, but if it is, it’s not one I could be said…
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My triumphant return to Twitter
A few years ago, I had a lurker account. Even that kind of low-level involvement with social media didn’t sit too well with me, though, and I shut it down. I suffered no nostalgia; there was, I discovered, no Twitter-shaped hole in my life. It had merely been pushing more valuable activities out of the…