Bright sunshine to a violent hailstorm and back again in 10 minutes

It just doesn’t feel like British weather but I expect we say that every year. And it is April. April showers and all that. However, we went from bright sunshine...

... to a violent hail storm with ear-splitting thunder - the garden was white over for a while, the hail stayed on the roof, until the storm turned to torrential rain and then passed on all within a few minutes.

It made the Jawbone Gang walk very muddy. The boots accumulate mud so you get taller and taller the further you go.

No sinister finds this time.

National Poetry Month

I’ve only just been told that it’s national poetry month so I thought I should mark the occasion with a couple of recommendations. I won’t go for the classics because everyone knows what they like in that respect. If I did, though, I'd mention Emily Bronte’s poetry, dark though it tends to be.

Nearer to home – geographically and timewise – how about physician-poet, Robert Jaggs-Fowler whose collection, A Journey with Time, is a delightful mix of styles and subject matter, light and serious.

Or this collection, Old Playgrounds, edited by Sue Knight, a family memoire spanning the decades from WWII.

Busted! Sisters caught peddling crime in Kingswood

On another sunny day in Hull, the sisters-in-crime headed for WH Smith, Prospect Centre, because everyone knows the old adage “Today Hull, tomorrow the world”. Having cleaned up there, the duo headed out to Kingswood where the law finally caught up with them.

What were the dodgy goods being snapped up during this little crime spree? All available on Amazon or currently on special offer in WHS Kingswood.
The East Yorkshire crime trilogy by Penny Grubb
Like False Money
The Jawbone Gang
The Doll Makers

And Danuta Reah’s dark psychological tale set in Sheffield, Not Safe

Took my eye off the ball and stepped into the virus trap

So easily avoided, but alas I'll have to sneeze it out now. And there is an up side.

So much has happened in the last few weeks that no-one's feet have touched the ground. The day jobs kept a grip on Monday to Friday and the book signings and related stuff filled Saturdays and Sundays. So it was full speed ahead on all counts from mid November to mid December.

The trick is to be very aware of the point where activity stops, so as to be ready for the army of viruses that hang about waiting for that moment when a busy person goes 'Whew! Time for a bit of a breather,' which is when they dive in to take hold, unless the barricades are well up. Barricades come in all shapes and sizes. Mental preparedness seems to help, as can a vitamin-rich diet. But anyway, no point in regretting a lack of awareness at this point. The viruses have arrived, taken hold and made themselves at home.

However, through the fog of congestion, in between sneezes and whilst not seeing stars from the coughing fits, I can look back over the month with a glow of satisfaction. Incredible though it seems, we shifted several thousand books, we had a stack of good publicity and the icing arrived to top off the cake the day after the final pre-Christmas event, with an offer from a publisher wanting to take the books to Canada and the USA.

Book shops rock!
We started here
... and ended here a few weeks later...

The cop always collars the crime writer.

The final day of the Yorkshire book signing tour was incident-packed, but before we came close to having collars felt, to the shoplifting incident or to the electronic capture of the missing books, we found we were still in a mystery race with the book distributors.

The race is who gets to the store first: us or the books? The mystery is why they seem so keen for us to win.

It's been touch and go with half a dozen of the venues, but we've now started to hit the individual shops' best-seller lists, which makes the bumpy ride worthwhile both for us and for the store managers who have pulled out all the stops to make the events successful. Especially Adam in Hull, Prospect Centre. We'd sold out of Like False Money and had a customer wanting a set of all three books. Adam's gizmo told him there were another two copies in the shop and, despite it being the busiest day of the year - not helped by a serious shoplifting incident - he hunted them down. They were in the crime section, not in the shoplifters' pockets.

The other final Saturday pre-Christmas venue was WHS, Kingswood, tucked cosily into the Kingswood retail park. It's the smallest of the shops I've been to. Would it attract in the buyers of crime fiction? For the first 30 seconds, I wasn't sure, then Seaside Radio arrived in the person of broadcaster, Paula Coomber, and a steady stream of shoppers followed, most of them happy to stop and chat and many to buy books. Before our allotted time was up, there were just four books left - and no Like False Moneys. This time, there were none lurking in hidden corners, but Agent raced off and scrounged a few from another branch.

Frustrating though it is to have no books left when there are still readers wanting to buy them, it's an amazing feeling to see an empty table where there had been a stack of books.

In all, that's eight venues since publication mid November and we ended where we started, back in WHS Prospect Centre, Hull. It wasn't in the original plan to return to any of the venues, but we were delighted the books were selling well enough that they wanted us back. But maybe those shoplifters took advantage, knowing the law would be diverted because the cop always collars the crime writer.

La Scala short story competition shortlist and prize presentation

The prize presentation has been delayed to the New Year but the shortlisted entrants will be notified before Christmas.

La Scala Studios had planned to run the prize presentation for their 2011 short story competition to coincide with a local East Yorkshire Dengie qualifier and puissance competition in December. However, because of a problem at the venue, the qualifier has had to be delayed into the New Year and is now expected to be held in February. The competition organisers have taken the decision to delay the prize presentation and to hold it at the same event as the delayed qualifier, unless there should be a further delay, in which case the prize presentation will be held as a separate event at a different venue.

All shortlisted entrants will be notified before Christmas and details of the prize presentation will follow as soon as they are confirmed.

Anyone wanting further information or clarification, please leave a comment on this blog and it will be answered here.

Scarborough Rocks!

An inauspicious start to Scarborough book signing day.

After previous experiences with loose wheels, what would go wrong today? It was a clear run through, a sunny day, beautiful sea views on the way. If we hadn't known the way and had used the SatNav, that might have unnerved us, because it can't cope with the new road into Scarborough and degenerates into hysterics as the little arrow tracks across fields and the voice rattles out, "Turn right - do a u-turn - keep left". Last chance for a big glitch on the journey would have been to find the multi-storey full, but it wasn't.

And on to WH Smith, Westborough where the Manager, Russell, had the signs and the books all waiting for us. It was all going far too smoothly. The obvious trap now would be to score a duck on the book sales front and indeed the first few minutes went by without a taker. But then things picked up and we estimate we sold a book every two minutes and for the first time ever we sold out!!

Big thanks to everyone who helped to make it such a success.

Yay! Scarborough Rocks!