Fifty at fifty! Meredith's Dagger


OK, so I missed it by a few minutes in BST as it's technically now the 21st August, but let's assume it's still the 20th for me as it still is for many of you.

Today I released Meredith's Dagger - my fiftieth novel - on my fiftieth birthday! Both of those facts are quite hard to believe. I made it to fifty! Woot! And fifty books? Well, I wrote most of them in the last ten years, not sure how...

I'm going to keep this short and give a little background to Meredith's Dagger, which I originally wrote in 2011 but then set it aside while I did further research into the relevant local history. Then I got caught up in all that research and it was a bit overwhelming, so I let it rest awhile to work on other books.

I've come back to it several times over the years since and made it through the first few chapters before I reached the point where I wanted to slap Julian - you'll reach that point too, but he's not so bad really once you get to know him. ;)

This year, I've essentially rewritten the entire novel - expanded the characters so they're deeper and more well-rounded. I've also fictionalised the setting, so whilst a lot of that historical research underpins the events, the entire work is fictional with a few 'inspired by reality' moments. Well, the bit about the cholera epidemic is true.

I hope you find Meredith's Dagger entertaining first and foremost, but there are some important historical truths within the story too, relating to the treatment of women in general and specifically within psychiatry.

On that note, I'd like to acknowledge and thank a few people, not least Vicki Coppock, my lecturer for the Politics of Mental Health, whose teaching provided the empirical evidence for what I had long believed was wrong with psychiatry and taught me the real 'art' of feminist critical thinking. Thank you also to Andrea, Nige, Amy, David, Michael and Jor for polishing this novel into the shiny, lovely thing it is, and for your encouragement and support. You are wonderful!

I'll post again later in the week and share jewellery sketches by Emma Pickering, which I'd hoped to include in the book. Alas I couldn't clean up the images, and the originals have been lost to the passage of time.

I was keeping this short, so I'll leave you with the purchase links:
BTP eBook: https://www.beatentrackpublishing.com/shop/proddetail.php?prod=md_format
BTP Paperback: https://www.beatentrackpublishing.com/shop/proddetail.php?prod=md
Amazon: http://mybook.to/meredithsdagger
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/945614?ref=b10track
B&N: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/merediths-dagger-debbie-mcgowan/1132189626?ean=2940163259724
Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/meredith-s-dagger
Apple: https://books.apple.com/gb/book/merediths-dagger/id1469904018

Thanks for reading!
Deb x


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