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On the 17th May, 2017, I undertook a flying visit to Oxford. I had received an invite from Isis Publishing and my audio publisher, Soundings, to afternoon tea and as it was my first opportunity to meet and personally thank them for signing up both The Thief’s Daughter and The Captain’s Daughter, I was determined to go.

I found myself next to the delightful author, Katie Fforde, and having a good humoured discussion on whether to put jam or cream first on a scone. Needless to say, I did it the Cornish way, jam first!

21st May, 2017
This week has been a busy time for me. At the start of the week I was a guest on The Bandwagon blog as part of the Cornish Reading Challenge. The Cornish Reading Challenge celebrates writers from the South West and Cornish based fiction. As part of my guest spot, I talked about my family tree and how living in Cornwall has changed through the generations.

Later in the day, I was heading to St.Ives Literary Festival.

It takes me one to two years to write a novel, however, typing The End is not the end. Those two little words mark the beginning of the next phase a manuscript – the editing phase. Great editing is often taken for granted, whereas poor editing is difficult to ignore. The sudden appearance of a plot hole or grammatical error will jolt the reader out of the fictional world they want to inhabit. When this happens, the book has momentarily “lost” its reader. The book industry invests a lot of time, money and effort in an attempt to prevent this from happening and editing is part of their armoury.

In 2011, my husband and I made the decision to walk the entire coastal path of Cornwall. With much enthusiasm and convinced that we would complete it in a few months, we set off from Hartland Quay in Devon so that we may experience crossing the county's border on foot. We aimed to walk a section of the path whenever we could spare the time, however due to other commitments (both work and leisure), changeable weather and (shamefully) lack of dedication, we have yet to complete the 422 miles (697km) path. Last week, 11 years after we had started, we arrived in Sennen Cove and made a promise (as we do every time we walk a section of the coastline), to not leave it so long before we walk the next part.