In the week of the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival (see post below) and the Booker prize long list (on which I’m delighted to find this debut, indie novel by a fellow member of Nottingham Writers Studio), it’s more than appropriate to host this particular guest post by Nicola Monaghan, aka Niki Valentine. Like last year’s guest poster, Lawrence Block, Niki wrote one of the Crime Express novellas, the very fine The Okanawa Dragon. I’ll be taking a proof of Possessed on holiday with me. It’s already available as an e-book and will be published in paper on October 25th. I am frequently asked what the difference is between my Niki Valentine books and those I write as Nicola Monaghan. I am tempted to say the Valentine…
It’s fifteen years since I last attended a Crime festival. Why? I was spoiled, in that, for several years we had Shots On The Page here in Nottingham – in 1995, we had Bouchercon, too, a rare honour. In 1997, I MCed a huge launch for the anthology I’d edited, City Of Crime, in a Council House ballroom packed with crime writers. Hard to follow that. I stopped writing YA crime novels soon afterwards. The market had changed, thanks to Harry Potter, and I was ready for a change, too. But last year I published my first crime novel for adults, Bone and Cane, and this year Mark Billingham was kind enough to invite me to host a table at the Theakston’s Old Peculier crime writing festival. In…
Oops, a month has gone by without a post. Sorry about that, especially to those who don’t read my ramblings on Twitter (these are near daily and can be found in a box to the left, unless you’re in China, where it’s barred: sorry, Martin). I’m getting stuck in to a redraft of my next novel, so am unlikely to write again for a while, but I do have a guest blogger lined up very shortly. Though, to confuse things, she’ll be writing under a pseudonym. These days, I need to leave at least eight weeks between drafts of a novel so I can see the thing fresh.This means that, even after the surfeit of end of term marking, I’ve had time to check out…
This review appears in today’s Nottingham Post Fifty years since her first hit and a few days after selling out the Royal Albert Hall, Dionne Warwick brings her band and the South Bank Sinfonia strings section to Nottingham, a city she first visited in the mid-60’s and has returned to regularly ever since. Unfortunately, it’s the middle of a long, wet bank holiday that has seen many flee the country. Only half of the seats have been sold. Dionne doesn’t mind. ‘The order of the evening is to have a good time,’ she begins. Her voice has ‘given her good news’. She’s over a cold, so will be able to add a couple of songs that she couldn’t manage earlier in the tour. The early…
It’s come to my attention that there’s a double bank holiday this week. How did I work it out? When I spent most of Thursday and Friday, days that I normally do my own writing work, doing university stuff, to make up for the university not being open the first two days of next week. Thanks for that, your majesty, and have a good one. To be fair, I’d switched one bit of teaching to later in the week so that I could go and see one of our greatest literary figures, the magus of the Midlands, Alan Moore, speak at Nottingham Contemporary on Tuesday night. And he didn’t disappoint. I got to ask him two questions. Was he ever going to complete his 80’s…