My favourite places

The Sheffield Telegraph has a piece about me and my favourite places in Derbyshire. Click here if you would like to read it. And here are photographs of a few of those places.

The view from the footbridge in Bakewell... The Monsal Trail... The view from Longstone Edge with some gorgeous hunk in the foreground - oh, that's one of my sons! Caseys shop, Great Longstone... A corner of my garden...

My blog's new look

I can't decide whether I like my new layout, or whether it is too light, too summery, too pretty.

How can it be too pretty?

I don't want people to come here and think "Oh, blimey, this woman doesn't know dark as well as light, she skips over the surface of life in a haze of sweet peas. She has no depth."

The allure of the mundane

The blog is a strange medium. When I read other people's blogs, I am fascinated by their accounts of the mundane. Well, that's true if their writing is reasonably accomplished, and as long as the design of their blog is attractive.

I am sitting here in bed. I am ill enough not to want to do any work, but bored enough to want to do something other than read Three Men in a Boat. So I thought I'd write a post about sitting in bed on a humid July day, looking out of the window at the sky and the trees, smelling the sweet peas in a vase on my dressing table. I thought I'd write about the vile virus I have and how this morning when I woke up ill at 4 a.m. I not only felt like death, I also felt overwhelmed by depression. I felt so blue that I decided the illness was psychosomatic. So I started to write a post and then thought "Hang on, do people really want to read this?" and decided they didn't. So I stopped.

A date at Harewood House

Next Saturday - August 2nd - I shall be at the Yorkshire Day Festival at Harewood House near Leeds. I'll be speaking about Zuzu's Petals and signing copies. I'd love to meet readers of Plotting for Beginners and/or Zuzu's Petals. Why not come along?

Oh boy oh boy oh boy!

My son has moved me onto a new version of Blogger which means I can play around with colours and fonts and then switch them back the next day if I change my mind. It's very exciting, and one more thing to waste my time on when I don't want to get down to writing.

Publication in the USA

Zuzu's Petals will be published in America next spring. You may read otherwise on Amazon, but they've got it wrong.

Zuzu's Petals launch party

Before the guests arrived... Taking a peek at the fabulous grub... Here come the first of the guests... The glamorous bar-tender in the conservatory... Reading an excerpt... A stack of Zuzu's... After the reading... The view from Scarthin... Signing an odd one in a corner... Giving the results of the prize quiz... The view from upstairs at Scarthin... Toasting the host... A restorative walk the day after... Photographs above were taken by Isaac Hepworth. Thanks, Ise.

p.s. Mary Dalgleish won the prize, and when she got home, Gerry ate it...