Sometimes I wonder why I bother. No, really. What with Climate Change and Brexit and so much depressing news, sitting at home writing stories seems a very inadequate response to the challenges of this world. I have started writing poetry too, which is even more useless...

One of those days: N M Browne

Some days I struggle to come up with anything blog worthy.You might say that has never stopped me before and you wouldn’t be wrong, but today it did. I addressed this problem as I do too many others by drinking black coffee and eating dark...

So this month I’ve mainly been thinking about Brexit but I’m not going to talk about that. My other obsession has been fake news, social media outrage, and identity politics. I’ve been pondering the way in which writing and the nature of the writer has some how become...

So this is a post about still being here. Not In a depressing way, but in a grateful and optimistic way. 

To clarify, I recently had a birthday - not a big one by the usual reckoning - but a birthday that neither my father nor my aunt made and therefore a birthday of...

I recently watched the premier of Peter Jackson's ‘ They Shall Not Grow Old’ live streamed to our local Odeon. It is an amazing film that makes the record of the war suddenly contemporary. It is wonderful and devastating. I am not qualified to talk about the war, its d...

I am of an age when it is remarkably easy to get stuck in a mental rut: new story ideas have the unmistakable flavour of other books.

Photo: Jeanne Girard: Sutton Hoo July 2018

You find yourself reaching for a familiar phrase, a particular sentence rhythm, hell, even a c...

I want to talk about magic. I’m not personally particularly magical: my wishes rarely come true, I have yet to discover the secret of eternal youth and I can’t fly though I have always really, really wanted to and I lack even the most elementary skills of turning raw i...

I am at that chatty stage of my new novel. It’s still new enough that I can  talk about it without boring myself rigid. I have

instead bored my husband rigid, not to mention a few other family members, who have all expressed just the right degree of enthusiasm. The...

I am a fiction addict. I cannot give up story. 

     I’ve always been the same. As a kid, I used to make stories up with the cuisinere rods that were supposed to teach me my number bonds. I day dreamed constantly and it I wasn’t making up stories I was reading them - un...

What we do affects the way we think.  London cabbies who've done ' the knowledge' have an enlarged hippocampus as well as a store of implausible anecdotes. Regular exercise is supposed to improve the memory, though as I spend most of the day staring into a screen, I fo...