A podcast interview

 The wonderful Lee Greenhough interviewed me about my hopes, beliefs and new pescatarianism. 

The short interview is here.

The whole interview in all its gory detail...  is here. 

Many, many thanks to Lee for inviting me to talk. Apologies if I made his ears bleed with all my chatter. 

Happy listening! xx

 

Script Sirens

Just a quick post to tell you about something I've got coming up, starting next Monday, 8th June 2020.

#GoingViral was created in response to the lockdown situation. You can read all about it here.

And don't worry if you're not free when we launch - as the videos are online, they will be accessible for some time to come.

If you watch and you like what you see, why not drop us a comment and share our content with your friends and family?


I will have more news for you shortly, I hope, when normal filming can resume around the world.

Until then - keep safe, and happy viewing! x

Fiction versus reality

What a strange situation we find ourselves in: spring is here, summer well on its way, and we are confined indoors for fear of dying.

Meanwhile the very people we are counting on to save us, are packed like sardines into public transport, expected to do their jobs, exhausted, and without the protective equipment that could ensure their safety - the world really has turned on its head.

There are a lot of phoney soothsayers around, telling all and sundry that they or someone else they know, prophesised this, that it is God's will, that it's all in the great plan. Believe that if helps you - I'd personally rather stick to the science.

But whatever your beliefs, there are some things that are undeniable. One is that all of us are going to suffer some loss - a family member, a friend, a colleague... The other is that our world will be forever changed.

There are some fears that don't just ever go away - the bogeyman under the bed, the mad axeman in the woods... Covid-19 will remain in our collective conscience long after it's claimed its last victim. Like the bogeyman, it will alter our perception of what's safe and what isn't. Probably forever.

When I wrote The Owners series and in particular Storm Clouds and the subsequent volumes, it was this sort of scenario I had in mind.

Set in the almost present, it depicted a world in panic over a series of devastating superstorms and the damage to the whole structure of civilisation which ensued. But more than that, it was a tale of humanity - of the people who were elevated by their situation and of those who used it for their own selfish needs. Isn't that exactly what we're seeing now?

Of course Storm Clouds is an apocalyptic tale and the volumes which follow it therefore, post-apocalyptic, and I hope with all my heart we don't follow that into reality but the motives of the people in my stories and in real life are the same...

Keep safe everyone and please be respectful and considerate. And hopefully we'll come through this together.

Happy reading. xx

Coronavirus

What a sad state of affairs - a pandemic is terrorising the world and all the sad little trolls have taken to Twitter, stating their hope that the 'Boomer' generation will be wiped out. 

Clearly we have raised many sociopaths alongside our otherwise well-adjusted population. Protected by the anonymity that  social media offers, they try to prey on our social weaknesses but in truth it only serves to highlight their own miserable existences. So for that reason, I'll have done with discussing them here - they're not worth a nano-second of our time. 

I think we are all shocked to be in this position... there cannot be one person who doesn't have family and freinds who are very vulnerable to this virus. 

And even if we self-isolate, I genuinelly can't see how we can do that for more than a month at a time. And what happens during that month? It's too scary to contemplate. 

Meanwhile the heros amongst us - the doctors, nurses, police and army, as well as the supermarket workers, the hospital cleaners, the fire and ambulance services, the lorry drivers who transport our foods, the electricity engineers, the sewage plant workers - they will continue to work, keeping the rest of us going. 

And I'm a little embarassed to be just a writer - a woman whose work is of no real value, serving only to entertain. But that's who I am. 

The world will keep turning whether I write another film or not. But if these heroes above stop doing what they do, the world will indeed grint to a halt. 

So from the bottom of my heart I want to say thank you to all of them!

Stay safe and well. xx