This Sunday there’s Heritage Open Day at Bagthorpe Gardens, Hucknall Road, Sherwood, Nottingham NG5 1DA (Opposite Teesdale Road). These are the allotments at the back of my house, the world’s oldest – dating from the 1840s. Some are cottage gardens, others more traditionally allotmenty. There’ll be displays of photos and artefacts. Refreshments, plants and produce for sale. (My partner’s baking cakes today). Wear stout shoes! Open: 12noon – 4pm. Tours at 12.30pm and 2.30pm. Oh, and I’ll be reading from my new aylum seekers & allotments novel, Secret Gardens, at 2pm. Selling and signing afterwards too. So why not come along? It’s all free (except for the refreshments and books, of course). Good reason to recycle an allotment photo above. This week’s song of the…

Lawrence Block: It’s so nice to be working together again. Jill Emerson: Oh, is that how you see it? LB: Well, don’t you?  We’ve got a book coming out together from Titan. Getting Off, by Lawrence Block writing as Jill Emerson. It’s Hard Case Crime’s first book since they hooked up with Titan, and their first hardcover book ever. JE: Blah blah blah. LB: You know, I don’t get your reaction at all. I thought you’d be excited. JE: You always think women are going to be excited. And then you think its their fault when they aren’t. LB: But— JE: I’m not even going to mention the fact that your name is like huge on the cover, and you need a magnifying glass to…

Early post this week because I’m off to Edinburgh at the weekend. Three things to say before the post proper. If you’d like to read about my perfect weekend, why not visit the Nottingham Post? This week, they also interviewed me about my new novel, Secret Gardens. More on that below. Finally, I have a surprise, very special guest blogging the Saturday after I get back (skip to the bottom to find out who). Here’s what I’ve been reading (and listening to) over the last month. My favourite novel was undoubtedly Pure by Andrew Miller, an engrossing account of the destruction of a graveyard by a naive engineer in eighteenth century Paris. This doesn’t sound like the subject matter of a great story, but I’ve…

I’m a little bleary today so excuse me if I ramble a little. I woke up early thinking about how to handle a scene in the edit of the second Bone & Cane novel, couldn’t get back to sleep. I won’t be writing the new scene until Monday. I never write fiction on weekends. During the nine and a bit years that I was a schoolteacher, I wrote every Saturday that we were at home. Once I was earning enough to become a full time writer (seventeen years ago, this month) I decided to allow myself one weekend day off (inevitably, there’s always marking and preparation on Sundays). And although I have a part time job teaching Creative Writing at a university now, I still…