Despite regularly tweeting photos
of my dogs/cats/chickens, I don’t tend to write about personal stuff and I
don’t plan to start now. However, my lack of blogging for an entire year needs
to be explained, in case you all think I’m being opportunistic, putting up a
new post in the same week as I publish a new book.
The past year has been horrible. My
husband and I have experienced ill-health, sudden deaths of a friend and a relative, and business problems mainly brought about by an
unscrupulous third party. We’ve even, reluctantly, put our house on the market.
Something had to give, and I decided blogging was that thing.
Throughout all this, I’ve surprised
myself by continuing to write my second book. I used to think I couldn’t write
if I was troubled, but it turned out I was wrong. Some days I managed just a
few words, others a lot more. I increased my daily word-count target from 500
to 1,000 and began to exceed that more often than I failed to meet it. Those
words didn’t pour out, or even flow. It was more like a trickle, but it was a regular trickle. And Too Soon a
Death gradually became more than the image of a body on the banks of the
River Tweed I had started with.
Time passes, and things are looking
a lot brighter on several fronts than they did at the end of 2014. I have not
one but two books out. No Stranger to
Death has a brand new cover to match its sequel, and as I write, both are
in the Kindle Top 100 for Scottish crime fiction. And I’m already planning
future blog posts.
I’m still looking forward to waving
goodbye to 2015, though.
