De-blog

Phew! [wipes brow] I've finally done it! My new novel is out in the wild (admittedly, it's still sitting on Amazon's doorstep waiting to be let in). Reverberations  is a stand-alone-ish novel in the Hiding Behind The Couch series – purchase links will appear on Beaten Track as soon as they're live. The ebook is already live on the Beaten Track store. Mysterious happenings are mounting up for Josh, Sean and their estranged alumni. Josh Sandison-Morley was born a sceptic. Why else would he insist there’s no such thing as ghosts when he’s eliminated every plausible explanation for the noises in his former therapy rooms? Sean Tierney’s having some ‘performance issues’. His GP says there’s no physical reason: his blood pressure is under control, and he’s stayed off the booze, ergo it’s all in his head. In the circumstances, being a palliative clinical psychologist isn’t proving (self-)helpful. Despite two decades of friendship and their grand plans to open a private psycho...

Alumni – Reverberations is finished! Now I wonder what all the fuss was about. :D To explain further/recap, here’s the Author’s Note I’ve added to the start of the book: As a way of making light of how long it’s taken me to finish this novel, I’ve spent the past five(!) years saying, “Josh has been stuck in the loft for [x] years now.” That was where I left him at the end of Reunions , published in April 2017—dangling from the loft hatch in his former ‘surgery’, a space he previously rented but now owns. It might, therefore, be somewhat confusing to find that Josh is not stuck in the loft at the beginning of this book. This isn’t because he cunningly escaped while the author was under siege from burnout. Rather, the five-chapter epilogue of Reunions and the first seven chapters of Reverberations overlap. This was always my intention—to add in the ‘how did we get here?’ background to events at the end of Reunions —but it should, I hope, also serve as something of a Previously…in...

Three blog posts in one day… There is a method to my seemingly sudden enthusiasm for posting, and it’s a one-off. Along with starting and never finishing stories, over the past few years I’ve been trying to come up with a streamlined, stripped-down layout for my website, the former incarnations of which had lots of pages and lots of content, but mostly it was duplicating what was available elsewhere. For instance, I had a page for the Hiding Behind The Couch series, but I also have hidingbehindthecouch.com , so that was pointless. All my books are listed – along with blurbs and purchase links – on Beaten Track, and then there are the pages and posts on this blog, and I thought… Work smarter, Deb. Which is why I’m posting about my forever-ongoing works in progress today. Twice. I mean, I have published other stuff in the time that Scene But Not Herd and Alumni – Reverberations  have been gathering virtual dust. See? Not as bad a writing drought as I thought! And I have a lot of ti...

Scene But Not Herd  is book 2 of  Front of House , a  Hiding Behind The Couch  The Next Generation  if you will. Scene But Not Herd  follows on from  Goth of Christmas Past  (Front of House #1). Draft blurb for  Scene But Not Herd : Amy is so done with people trying to organise her life. By people, she means her bossy older sister Fi, who insists she’s protecting Amy’s proprietary rights to her software, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying. Meanwhile, Hadyn’s fallen into a black hole. Literally. Managing the studio is taking up all of his time, his hopes for pursuing a relationship with Amy are teetering on the event horizon, and his new songs suck. Krissi and Jay’s prodigies aren’t the only ones who are fed up. Krissi’s ‘opportunity of a lifetime’ is driving her nuts, Jay’s stagnating behind a desk, and virtual ice cream and swings just doesn’t cut it. Then there’s the not-small matter of what do about Stu…

Poor Josh has been stuck in the loft for five years. That's how long I’ve been working on Alumni – Reverberations . It’s part of the Hiding Behind The Couch series and started life as Alumni (Season 8). That was in 2017, after I published  Reunions (Season 7 – which ended with Josh bravely climbing that ladder), but for various reasons, I had to set Alumni aside. Even now, I can’t honestly say the end is in sight, but it’s a lot closer than it was, which is good news for Josh. OK, minor spoiler: he does eventually find a way down from the loft. I know because I wrote that part about three years ago. The trouble was, the further I progressed with this instalment, the harder it became…until I realised I wasn’t writing Season 8. I was writing a renaissance of Ruminations . At last, it all made sense. So here we are, five years later, and Alumni – Reverberations is still a work in progress. I haven’t decided on the final cover other than it being Ouija-board inspired. However, I...