De-blog

It's not really going to be a moan, but I liked the alliteration, and I am starting off with a grumble. Seriously, who gets bitten by a spider in England? Me, apparently, so said the nurse at the Minor Injuries unit in our local hospital. I'm on the mend, with the help of antihistamines and, subsequently, more sleep than I've had in months. I didn't see what got me, but there are only a few bitey spiders in the UK, one of which is a tiny thing we call the money spider, also called the sheet weaver spider (the photo shows why). There's an old wives' tale in the UK that if a money spider runs across your palm, you'll come into money, but the little buggers stick with you. They'll abseil on a strand of web, which you think you've successfully attached to something else only to find you're still carrying a miniature passenger. * Image credit:   Sheet Weaver (Money) Spider's Web :  Watchduck  (aka Tilman Piesk) For the above reasons (bi...

On this day, ten years ago, I started writing Hiding Behind The Couch . Season One. Not that it was 'season one' at the time, or even 'book one'. It was my second novel and my first foray into National Novel Writing Month , and I wrote it for therapy. I've written about the reasons why previously, so I won't rehash those here, and while I often joke that I wrote my own therapist (or two), there's an element of truth to that. FREE Nov 4-5 2017 http://mybook.to/HBTCBox01 I've recently started studying for a Master's degree in psychology, and in my initial one-to-one with my tutor, we were discussing my interests outside of education—specifically, writing and publishing. He mentioned 'bibliotherapy', which I'd never heard of before. Frankly, I'm appalled I hadn't, but still, I know what it is now. Bibliotherapy, briefly, is the use of reading in counselling and psychotherapy. This can be in an instructional sense (for i...

A while back, Hans Hirschi sent me a set of questions about my ongoing series, Hiding Behind The Couch . He used snippets from it in his review of A Midnight Clear , but, of course, I write long. I thought I’d share the rest of my responses, as they offer insight into where the series came from, my favourite character(s), the best order to read, and so on. So, without further ado… What is Hiding Behind The Couch? Hiding Behind The Couch is the ongoing story of nine friends from high school/university and the important people in their lives. The stories are about life, so there’s love and romance, births, deaths, marriages, murder, industrial espionage, accidents, affairs, successes, failures – it’s a fictional micro-social study, and it’s inclusive. People are people, and I don’t distinguish by superficial differences, but to clarify, there are LGBTQ and heterosexual characters, as well as characters from some of the different ethnic groups that make up the rich culture of...