I have failed to write a post on the Bookswap event held in Chichester to raise funds for the Mongol Rally, but, suffice to say, it was such a great success, we are doing it again! Here’s the new poster:

Click HERE to find out more about The Mongol Rally

What a day! Possibly the best £45 I’ve ever spent. Although the £45 grey faux suede zip up the back stiletto boots I bought to wear to the conference come a close second. The VWC are the Verulam Writers Circle and they don’t do group hugs – they take their writing very seriously. And so [...]

Blog posts were few and far between last week since most of my writing energy and time has been taken up with NaNoWriMo. For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo stands for ‘National Novel Writing Month’ – “Thirty Days and Nights of Literary Abandon!”. The basic challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of [...]

Yesterday I went to sunny Bognor to my first ever creative writing group. I’ve been on courses and to writing festivals but this was different – more intimate and informal. I just posted a post extolling the virtues of the t’interweb (free books!) but here’s another reason to be cheerful about the presence of this [...]

Finally, today, after much anticipation was The Literary Consultancy’s Industry Day. This was part of the ‘Chapter and Verse’ programme I enrolled in over a year ago and it took place at the new Free Word centre in Farringdon. I completed the six sessions of mentoring (conducted via email) with Matron in June and submitted [...]

I went to the launch event for Chichester writer Isabel Ashdown’s debut novel ‘Glasshopper’ last night. It was at Chichester University where Isabel has already completed her BA in Creative Writing and is currently studying her MA. This was the first book launch event I’ve been to so I was very keen to see what [...]

I went to Glastonbury in 1995 but since then I’ve been cheating when it comes to festivals. When I lived in London I went to loads but grabbed a cab home, slept in my own bed and had a shower before heading off again in the morning. I’ve just returned home from Bestival on the [...]

This article was published in the launch edition of The Joy Magazine in June 2009. The Festival took place in March. In 2006 I was living in West London, my mind wavering at a fork in the road. Should I continue climbing up the corporate ladder I had been steadily ascending for the past decade, [...]