Hello and a Happy New Year to you.
I hope you all had a good Christmas, despite the difficult times we live in. We had a quiet Christmas like most folk, but did enjoy a Skype quiz with our family on New Year’s Eve.
It was cold, with a hard frost in North Devon on New Year’s Day, and we went for a five mile walk along Braunton Burrows and Crow Beach. I took a few photos and you can read about the walk here: Wintry Walk at Braunton Burrows The weather was pretty bleak on that day, but there are a few bulbs just coming up in my garden, so hopefully spring is just around the corner.
One good thing about lockdown, is that with so much time on my hands, I’m getting on with writing my third book. I think it’s likely to be called “The Journey”, though don’t hold me to that yet, as I have been known to change my mind! The chapters are all planned out, which is half the battle, and I’ve just finished writing chapter fourteen.
Luckily for me, my daughter-in-law Laura is a graphic designer and very talented at producing the book covers for me. She’s already come up with a lovely cover for “The Journey” which matches in with the first two books in “The Hartford Manor” series, so she may not be best pleased if I change it.
Apart from writing the new book, I’ve been trying to get my head around other things that self-published authors are advised to do to market their books. Until I published my second book, “The Angel Maker” in May last year, I’d made no effort to sell any, so I decided it was time to try to get them noticed and see if people liked them.
My son David has set up a website for me and I’ve been trying my hand at writing blogs. You may have seen a couple that I’ve shared in my last two newsletters. Learning how to actually format a blog on WordPress has been quite an uphill challenge for me, but I think I’m getting the hang of it and now I quite enjoy writing them. However, people are bombarded with so much information and so many emails these days that I’ve decided to only produce one newsletter a month. You can take a look at My Website here.
I’ve also tried to increase my online presence on social media. This has entailed setting up an author page on Facebook and also a Twitter account. As someone who had barely used social media before, this has proved to quite a challenge. Anyway you can now follow me on Facebook or Twitter if you wish.
A Good Book for a Cold Winter’s Day
This is my favourite Catherine Cookson novel and, although her books were written some decades ago, there are not many family sagas to beat them. I read many of her books when I was younger and am now re-reading some, and enjoying them a second time around. This book is particularly well written and the characters are interesting and likeable. Cissie Brodie is just fifteen years old when she loses her parents to cholera and the family is turned out of their home. She is left with nine brothers and sisters to raise by herself and has to find somewhere for them to live. Desperate to keep her family together and out of the workhouse, she reluctantly lets two of her younger brothers go down the mine to work. When Cissie attracts the unwanted attentions of a local landowner, her life becomes even more difficult. The book illustrates how hard life was in the 1830s and how lucky we are to be living now and not then. The book kept me engaged from start to finish and I enjoyed it very much. If you like historical fiction, I think you will love this one.
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