Excellent workshop with Martyn Waites at the Guildford Book Festival. He gave some great tips on how to drive a crime story forward. He also outlined a writing exercise which he called 'A crime story in five paragraphs' to help you work through some key elements of a crime story. He was really pleasant and very willing to answer any questions about all aspects of writing and getting published and his own journey into crime writing. Most illuminating! I am not sure whether it was encouraging or discouraging to find out that his first novel took five years to get published.

This year I have finally managed to get organised enough to attend the Guildford Book Festival this month. I have booked myself on the crime writing workshop in an effort to gain some insight to help me move my crime novel along. I may even attend other workshops as well. We'll see what happens. I am really looking forward to it.

My website is now up and running though still a work in progress. I am surprised at how additive it is and I find myself thinking about the layout and content all the time, thinking what I can change and what I can add to make it more interesting. Never mind just filling up the pages I have created so far.

I have chopped and changed so much already and no doubt will continue to do so. Probably another displacement activity to avoid actually writing my novels and other work in progress. Yes, I have two novels on the go. The first have been working on for several years now - the one I have always threatened to write and to include everyone I know. Then, there is the one I started writing during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). This one is further along, having attempted to reach 50,000 words during the month of November. I managed 30,000 and the count is now up to 60,000, 40,000 short of my target.

But more about these wonderful works in later blogs. For now, it is back to website designing.

Until next time!

Cherry B