News

Monday 21st April 2025

It’s been a while… So, over the last year and a little bit we moved house to rural County Mayo – a small cottage with 10 acres of land, a vegetable patch and a polytunnel so that we can ‘grow our own’ and this Spring we’ve planted over a 1,000 new Irish native hedgerow plants and trees in order to help biodiversity. Next step is building a large wildlife pond! But I have also finished the novel. Tentatively entitled ‘Love, Dublin’ it’s set in the year 2000 between London and Dublin and, hopefully, feels a bit like Tales of the City meets the Aisling books – funny and sad and a bit romantic… Anyway, it’s gone through three drafts and my early reader enjoyed it so that’s a good sign. It’s now out on submission to a few choice literary agents so fingers-crossed that someone likes it enough to take it on. In the meantime, I’ve started Book 2 in the same series, with some old characters and some new ones too. I also need to tidy up a second draft of a children’s book (ages 9-12) but I know that needs a good bit of work. And I have a spooky short story niggling away at the back of my mind (as it has done for the past year or so…) so hopefully that will get out of my head and onto the screen sometime soon. In the meantime, I’m taking every bit of Mayo Spring sunshine that I can find to week out the flowerbeds… Bxxx

Wednesday 10th January 2024

Well, here we go! After finishing up with The Gutter bookshop in September 2023 I gave myself a break until Christmas to rest, recuperate and recover from the past 14 years of running my own business. The time simply flew by (possibly because I spent a lot of it asleep…) but my New Year’s resolution was to embark on my next project – writing a novel… It’s still very early days (January motivation is not my vibe…) but I am slowly settling into a new routine of writing a 1,000 words a day in my local library. It’s good for me to get out of the house and I’m a person that thrives on structure and routine so it feels like a good fit for me. I’m giving myself the freedom to write whatever comes to me and not worry too much about the results – as long as I’m hitting my word count each day I can slowly improve on my writing skills. “Enjoying it” may be pushing things a bit far at the moment but it’s slowly starting to feel like something I can possibly accomplish so on we go… More updates to come as I continue but for now, Happy New Year to you all and may 2024 treat you kindly. NB I’m still looking after my Gutter Bookclubs (Classics, Get Active and Gutter Bookclub) each month so I hope to see some of you there! As a little treat I’ve booked myself a week away in Malaga, Spain for the end of January to try to keep my Vitamin D levels up with a bit of Winter sunshine, and also to concentrate on getting those words written every day with a minimum of distraction so wish me luck… Bxxx

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