My Writing Odyssey

I haven't bought a television guide for years.  I always found that there was never anything of interest in the terrestrial and free-view listings, I never found a layout for the sky listings that didn't leave me confused, and there was always one answer on the bloody crossword that I just couldn't get! So it was a complete stroke of luck that I turned on the bedroom television after my bath on Thursday, and flicked across to BBC Two in time to catch a fascinating documentary called The Last Days of Anne Boleyn. Tudor history has always been a subject of great interest to me, long before my nose started burying itself into CJ Sansom's addictive Shardlake series, and even people with little interest in that period if history have heard of Anne Boleyn.  The first Queen of England to be officially executed (although I doubt she was the first - and we know she wasn't the last - Queen to be killed off by her husband) was also the cause of Henry VII's forming the

Being married to a gamer - and being with aforementioned gamer for ten years before marrying him - it was unavoidable that I would learn a thing or two about video games!  Happily for both of us, I developed a tiny interest in some of the games that appeared on our screens. The really nice thing about some of the game series is that they remember the reader and publish a book or two.  My favourites at the moment are the very excellent Assassins Creed series by Oliver Bowden, which I have read with as much enthusiasm as any other series.  Oliver Bowden is a very talented author with a very comfortable writing style, which is not hampered in the slightest by his novel's need to tie in with the video game it was published alongside.  Another author of note, John Shirley, enjoyed a little more freedom by writing Bioshock: Rapture  as a fascinating prequel to the hugely popular game series.  This proved to be a bit of a slow starter, but a patient reader was quickly rewarded as the st

Because apparently it's spring now!  With its icy rain and dismal grey clouds (yep, still spring), a weary traveller returns to her blog after eighteen months of silence... I can only apologise for leaving everybody and just vanishing for what is now eighteen months.  A lot of things have happened, some of them were good, but I've been under a self-imposed silence for coming up to a year now, thanks to a particularly unexpected - but thankfully not literal - back-stabbing that left me feeling lost, confused, and with no clue whatsoever who I could trust.  Not that I thought any of my patient and lovely blog followers would be contributing to my new troubles, but I do share this blog on my Facebook and Twitter accounts where anyone can see them.  For that reason I just stopped talking on either account completely, thinking that nobody could use anything I said against me if I ever said anything.  On principle this is fairly sound, provided you don't have a volatile temper