Hello Ladies, Gentlemen, those who aren’t quite sure and, of course K’Barthans. This weeks’ guest on Box 010 was Lynda Wilcox writer of the children’s adventure books and light hearted whodunits, the latest of which, Strictly Murder. You can find her website here.
Right I hope you’re sitting comfortably, here are the results…
Lynda, you got a fine and dandy 3 items into Box o10 and they are.
Rude people/the current trend for rudeness
Excellent, next time someone’s rude to me I can just stick my fingers in my ears and shout, ‘la la la I can’t hear you from Box o1o.’
Texting and mobile phones
Because they all deserve to walk into lamp posts
Council Speak and the way they waste money
Yes! In it goes.
Lynda thank you for joining us on Box 010.
Ladies and gents there will be a slight hiatus now as it ‘s the school holidays and I’m afraid I have to turn into Mumzilla for 6 weeks but Box 010 will be back in September… unless I do a rogue one in the middle of August.
Hello Ladies, Gentlemen, those who aren’t quite sure and, of course K’Barthans. Welcome, once again, to Box 010; a bit of light whimsy which is, in no way, inspired by the popular BBC programme Room 101. Here’s now it works. Every two weeks, my special guest will pop in and then present us with five things they would like to see consigned to the dustbin of existence. This week’s special guest is Lynda Wilcox writer of the children’s adventure books and light hearted whodunits, the latest of which, Strictly Murder. You can find her website here.
Hello Lynda. Right before I let you rant, would you like to tell us a bit about yourself.
Of course, I was born in Derbyshire and, even as a small child, read voraciously, happily losing myself for hours in Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven and Famous Five books. Looking for a new source of income when my husband was made redundant in his mid-fifties, I turned to writing. In the beginning I wrote the sort of children’s adventures I’d been so fond of myself when young, and then turned my hand to old-fashioned whodunits, which I’d enjoyed since my twenties. I’m happy to say that both have proved popular, because I have a lot more stories yet to tell.
That’s interesting, I reckon Enid Blyton got a whole generation of kids into writing. Most of the early stories I wrote were Famous Five style, too. So, the time has come… What would is your fist candidate for Box 010?
Celebrity chefs or, more properly, TV chefs: I learnt to cook at my mother’s knee, though I suppose I must have been taller than that or I’d never have reached the stove! In my day cookery was taught in schools. Now we have to learn how to prepare and cook our food from the likes of Delia Smith or Raymond Blanc. Everything is ‘fresh’, ‘crisp’, and ‘beautiful’ before it becomes ‘delicious’, exquisite, or ‘perfect’. Yes, well they’d hardly say their ingredients were stale, soggy or bland, now would they? Or that the resulting meals tasted disgusting. I’d love to be able to pout and flaunt my way around a kitchen the size of Nigella Lawson’s but I live in your average semi and cook in a kitchen where you have to close all the cupboard doors before there’s room to open the fridge. And we don’t all live in London with a bustling daily market just around the corner. Open my kitchen door and there’s a main road facing you, not a perfect pottager or herb garden. I’m as likely to get run over as I am to find a sprig of mint!
Hmm… I do enjoy a good cookery programme but I agree that many of them tend to make certain assumptions which are just plain daft! And Nigella does my head in.
What is the next item you would like to hurl, through a black hole, never to be seen again?
Chilli with Everything: Not everyone likes chilli, and even ordinary white pepper is too hot for me, but these days the wretched stuff turns up in everything — even chocolate and ice cream! Whatever next? Chilli flavoured Victoria sponge for heaven’s sake? I’ve no objection to those who like their food so hot they can’t actually taste it, but recently my local supermarket’s selection of barbecue meat didn’t include a single item that wasn’t hot and spicy or crammed to the gunwales with chilli, lime and coriander. Hey, all I’m asking for is a little choice, OK? Besides the idea of a barbecue is surely not to feel that you’ve cooked your own tongue on the damned thing.
Mwah ha hahargh! I am going to be thinking about cooked tongue for the rest of the day! Hmm another controversial one there, I reckon. I love chilli, but I do understand this, because I’m allergic to mushrooms and the amount of times I’ve explained this carefully and been served something stuffed to the gunwales with them are too numerous to count. Sorry, going off on one there.
What is the third verucca of existence that you would like to burn from the foot of time?
Council Profligacy and Council Speak:
Excellent, sounds like a good one!
Yes. It causes more chuntering, more dark mutterings in Wilcox Towers than any other. Less than half a mile from my front door, proudly displayed over the entrance to the District Council offices is a fancy sign saying, ‘Your District Council — Working For You’. I KNOW THAT! Who the hell else would they be working for? Patagonian llama farmers?
God know how many hundreds or thousands of pounds of tax payer’s money, MY money, they wasted stating the blindingly obvious. Just how dumb do they think the local residents are? Oh, OK, don’t answer that one. Just tell me why, when the council have removed all the cameras from speed traps around the county, they need to spend several hundred thousand quid painting the empty boxes? It’s madness. If you are thinking of going and working for them, you’ll need a degree in gobbledegook. A current vacancy calls for, ‘a portfolio holder for community engagement and wellbeing’. I’m applying myself — as soon as I’ve worked out whether they want an MC for bingo nights or a doctor!
Local Government Gobbledgygook excellent suggestion. I suspect we’ll all be voting for that one. OK, Lynda, what is the fourth item you’d like to put into Box 010?
Texting and mobile phones: Specifically those who insist on keeping their hands down, thumbs going nineteen to the dozen as they walk down crowded streets expecting everyone else to get out of their way or risk being barged into. They surge across busy roads, still typing Cul*r, oblivious to traffic and the world around them. Wherever they are, in supermarkets, libraries, on the train, they feel compelled to whip out their Nokias (and there’s a euphemism, if ever I heard one!) and call someone to announce the fact. They discuss the most personal details, medical or financial, in plain hearing of all around them, forcing you to listen. I don’t want to hear about your attack of dysentery on holiday, your gynaecological examination or how you had to transfer money to pay for your son’s new car. Please, please, please, just shut up!
Oh I heartily agree with this one. Come on readers, stuff it in! Right, Lynda, we’re coming to your fifth and final item. Please can you tell us what it is.
Rude people: whatever happened to common courtesy? To good manners? Don’t people bother with P’s and Q’s any more? I’m fed up with being barged off pavements, pushed out of the way in shops, and cut-up by other road users. For all that they get a bad press, it’s rarely young people who are guilty of such bad manners, either. While I was shopping last week, a forty-something woman cried, “Oh there it is”, and without so much as an “excuse me”, shoved out an arm right in front of my face to take something off the shelf. Similarly, whilst looking at the Alfred Jewel in the Ashmolean Museum, someone reached in front of me with a mobile phone to take a picture of it. Grr. I can find no excuse for such rudeness and it makes my blood boil.
In that case, readers, to reduce risk of Lynda’s blood boiling – which can’t be effecetious for her health, please, please, vote rude gits into Box 010.
Lynda, thank you so much for joining me. Readers, it’s now time to vote! Join me next week when we find out how many of Lynda’s choices are going into Box 010. To find out more about Lynda’s books you can visit her website here, more on her latest release, Strictly Murder, at the bottom of the page.
The Estate Agent’s details listed two reception, kitchen and bath. What they failed to mention was the dead celebrity in the master bedroom. Personal assistant Verity Long’s house hunt is about to turn into a hunt for a killer. It will take some fancy footwork to navigate the bitchy world of dance shows, TV studios, and dangerously gorgeous male co-stars. When Verity looks like the killers next tango partner, she discovers that this dance is… Strictly Murder
Hello everyone, just a quick heads up, there’s a great flash fiction competition running over on Michael Brookes’ blog and yes there is still time to enter. You can find more details, here.
Last week’s special guest was David Haywood Young, who has two novels published; a supernatural mystery and a romance/mystery with a bit of Gypsy ghost story, along with a book of short stories which he says are ‘mostly strange’ and therefore, in my view almost certainly to be recommended. He’s been running a giveaway on his site so I hope you all went over there and tried out his books, for free. Keep ’em peeled for his a new book, too, will be out in a few weeks. So, without more ado, David, here are your results.
You got two of your five items into Box 010 and, ladies and gentlemen, while I’m writing, I’m afraid I have to censure you. When you get a list of pet hates with well… lists on it, it’s a pretty piss poor effort when it doesn’t get voted- Ah, yes, right, I see. On second thoughts thank you for not voting lists and therefore Box 010 into Box 010.
Congratulations David for persuading us all to vote for two of your items these are:-
Mathematics.
I’m rubbish at Maths, which means there’ll be one less thing I’m bad at out there, which means I get to look good. Thank you.
The Rule of Law.
Yes, in it goes.
David, thank you so much for joining me and taking part in Box 010. Next week, Lynda Wilcox will be attempting to persuade you to hurl her pet hates into the abyss that is Box 010 and sellotape down the lid.
M T McGuire grew up on a windy down but now lives in Bury St Edmunds, in Suffolk with her partner, son and a large hairy cat.
She has apparently checked all unfamiliar wardrobes for a gateway to Narnia but is disappointed to report that she hasn’t found one yet.
If you like car chases, humour, quirky characters, a hint of romance and a nice simple battle between good and evil you may enjoy her award winning debut novel, Few Are Chosen, K’Barthan Trilogy: Part 1. It’s a fantasy cops and robbers – and quite a few other things – story. Actually, you might even like the second one as well, The Wrong Stuff, K’Barthan Trilogy: Part 2.
Warning: both books contain car chases, jokes, futuristic technology and sarcasm. Book 2 even contains romance!
Here are ten other things you never knew, and may wish you didn’t, about M…
Talking about thinking coolly in a crisis, in this post reminded me of an instance where that very much didn’t happen.
Yeh, so you know in films where some bloke runs in and shouts, “They’re beating up thingwot, come and help” and everyone gets up and runs with him to the rescue? Yeh well that doesn’t happen in real life. What they do in real life is ask you about fifty million pointless questions interspersed with the phrase ‘calm down’ while you shout, repeatedly, “Will you just come the f**k with me to rescue so and so?”
Here’s how I learned that this scenario is in absolutely no way, whatsoever, based on fact….
One Saturday night, aged about 18, I was walking home with a boyfriend and about 100 yards from our house he was attacked. We knew his assailant had 10 friends round the corner because we’d walked through them. I thought about kicking the bloke in the nuts but he looked pretty beefy and able to take down both of us. I wondered whether to knock on the door of a nearby house but I knew they wouldn’t dare let us in. So I hit on a cunning plan. I would go and get reinforcements. My own house was 100 yards away containing my dad a 6ft 2 ex rower and my brother, a well built 6ft 4.
So I ran to my house as fast as I could; speed was of the essence. I was calm until I tried to unlock the door. Lots of adrenaline = shaky hands. Did it but the thing that made it hard was not my shaky hands. It was the key my parents had left in the other side. Yes, they’d locked us out, and left the key in, making it impossible for us to get in. Except that by some miracle, I managed to get my key into the lock – yay! But it dropped out and jammed under the door meaning it opened about five inches and wedged fast.
I try to pull it closed again but it’s wedged fast. I ring the bell.
Dad and brother come to the door, taking their time.
“Quick! come with me, X is getting beaten up. Please come and help him,” I say. Imagine a voice of urgency here and a slightly shaky demeanour but I still had a handle on the panic. I push at the door. Trying to move it but it’s wedged fast.
“Calm down, we’ll get this open,” Dad gets down and sees the problem at once. “You’ve jammed the key underneath it.”
Why was it even in there? Yes, I thought that.
“Forget about the key. Come out of the back door, X is getting beaten up. NOW. I came home for your help.” The tone of my voice has gone up and the decibels have increased.
“Why would I want to come out of the back? It’s alright, it’ll be open in a minute. What’s the hurry?”
“They’re beating up X. Please come and help.” (Screaming).
“There nearly got it. Where’s X?” asks Dad.
“For fuck’s sake! Why d’you think I’m in this state? He’s getting beaten up!”
“What?” asks Bro.
“Beaten up, attacked just down there.” I point.
“OK calm down, come inside and tell us all about it,” says Bro.
“I can’t come in and fucking calm down. X is just down the road being beaten to a pulp and he needs our help.”
“Ah that’s got it,” says Dad. “We’ll have this door open in a jiffy.”
They opened the door then. The porridge-headed smeckers. Just as X turned up looking reproachful.
“Oh hello X. What happened to you?”
X throws me a look as if to say “you didn’t fucking tell them?”
“Everything alright?” says Dad.
Of course it’s fucking not.
“No I’ve just been attacked,” says X.
The penny finally drops.
“Where did you go?” X asks me reproachfully
“I came to get help but it went wrong.” I glare at Dad and Bro. Very wrong.
X looks at me even more reproachfully, and I realise he’s thinking, “yeh right. Coward,” and know that our relationship is doomed.
Hello everybody peps! Welcome, once again, to Box 010; a bit of light whimsy which is, in no way, inspired by the popular BBC programme Room 101. Here’s now it works. Every two weeks, my special guest will pop in and then present us with five things they would like to see consigned to the dustbin of existence. This week’s special guest is David Haywood Young, who has two novels published; a supernatural mystery and a romance/mystery with a bit of Gypsy ghost story, along with a book of short stories which he says are ‘mostly strange’ and therefore, in my view almost certainly to be recommended. He is running a giveaway on his site at the moment so you can try his books, for free, and it’s also worth keeping an eye out for his new release, which will be out in a few weeks.
Hello there David.
Hello.
Thank you for visiting us today. Before we attempt to consign your pet hates to history, please can you tell us a little bit about yourself.
If I exist at all, there’s a good chance I’m a bit odd by nature. Even-tempered, though. At six years old I began writing (and binding!) books for my younger brother and sister. I taught them both to read, as I needed an uncritical audience. Eventually the day came when my parents no longer gave me lunch money. I considered burglary (I still consider it fairly often) but ended up combining software development and professional poker…for more than twenty years. But I shut down my company last year in favor of writing. We’ll see how it goes. It feels fairly wonderful so far.
As MTM mentioned, I’ve published two novels and a collection of short stories (mostly strange). All three are available, one per customer (on the honor system), via a giveaway I began on the solstice: http://davidhaywoodyoung.com/blog will get you there until 21 July 2013. Though leaving my site again will be entirely up to you, as there’s nothing in it for me.
Also, I’m @DHY_writer on Twitter if you’d like to say hello there. Which you can actually do twenty-eight times in a single tweet, and I think that’s awfully friendly.
Phnark, it is too… I will be trying it out shortly! Mwah ha hargh. Alright then, let’s get onto the action. David, what is the first item you’d like to throw into Box 010?
Lists: Yes, all lists. My wife creates them daily, and I love her very much, and this prohibition will resolve all related issues. Also, if it doesn’t, we won’t know. Besides, I once heard someone say that a plan is just a list of things that don’t happen. I figure it’s better to strike at the root than to attempt to model an entire universe—even supposing we only have the one to deal with—and all its myriad interactions on chewed-up tree pressings. Even Post-its, in my opinion, are not truly adequate to the task. Life should be experienced as is, not interpreted via coercive flights of predigested (and appallingly limited) fancy. Or so I suppose.
This is very true, McOther makes lists and thinks things through, I find that any list I make will be overtaken by events anyway… like my to do list for today, for example, which went pear shaped about five minutes after leaving the house.
Sorry, where was I, ah yes, Thing 2. What is your second candidate to set adrift in the darkness of Box 010, never to be seen again?
Constraints: This certainly includes the list (see issue #1 above) of restrictions you sent me. I’m not to include items people have previously identified as unnecessary/hated/expunge-worthy?
Mwah ha ha hargh! No! Those were the things that are already in Box 010 so in theory you can’t throw them in a second time because they don’t exist, although they do because I’m in Box 010 now, because McOther was thrown into it with all other Lawyers last week. Phnark.
Fine! But this is the beginning of the end. Once we start down this path, we’re on a path, and that means we’re probably not paying as much attention as we ought to various less-than-obvious dangers I obviously can’t enumerate (see above, and also counting is by nature too limiting). So…excuse me, were you saying something? I was to make a point? Oh. Well, too bad. Now what?
You loony! Now, I think we should move onto your third item.
Agriculture: All right, enough fooling around. This one is serious. I’m a natural hunter-gatherer type, by which I mean I’m too lazy to do much until the need for food (or cash) becomes pressing. Yet another source of marital friction! She feels we should put something aside for emergencies—and once that’s done, well, we might need more for a more serious emergency. Fine! I declare an end, right here. If we can stage a zombie apocalypse (even if without actual zombies), and go back to proper societal norms (meaning I hunt when hungry and do very little else, but as a noble primitive rather than a slacker) I think the world at large will run much more smoothly.
Hmm… I get the logic in that but I’m a poor hunter and I like to know where the next meal is coming from. Being a lazy slacker though… that sounds cool.
Mathematics: An easy one. Not that math-
Eh?
Remember, I’m roughly American. Not that math(s) is inherently horrible, but so many misunderstand its function! It’s another system for modeling reality, sort of like—wait for it—lists. People start thinking the system we’ve made up can somehow override reality, as if two chairs are always precisely twice as good as one when a body wants to sit. Mathematics can model bits of the real world, but fails to replace them. Nonetheless folks believe they can prove things about the physical world via appallingly simple flights of mathematical whimsy…and so we develop perversely boring religions all over the place. No more! Leave the math to the computers, I say. And don’t believe anything they say either.
As someone who hasn’t passed a maths exam since the age of 9, think maths is a cracking candidate for Box 010. Then we wouldn’t need money, either and we’d swap stuff, which is so much simpler. OK, what’s your fifth and final candidate for the Box of Doom that is, 010?
The rule of law: Well, look, this one really applies more to the rulers than the ruled…and who could argue that their behavior (Yep, I’m still American) has been what it ought to be of late? Or at any other time. So, the heck with it. From now on, I say we all do just as we please—
Hmm… but David, what pleases you might be a complete pain in the arse for—
What, you’re interrupting me again? Yes, of course this will be mandatory. How else could it work? Giving orders is ridiculous, but come the revolution anyone caught following them will be first against the wall! Because I said so.
There, that told me! Thank you so much for joining us, folks, this week’s guest has been David Haywood Young, who you can also find on twitter, saying hello a lot so you can follow him here @DHY_writer. Now the time has come to vote. So, Ladies and Gents, do rules appal you? Is planning, like spare tyres, for whimps? Only you can decide…
Actually, I was a wanker of monumental proportions. Not intentionally, I hasten to add. It was just that an amalgamation of badly made small decisions culminated, this morning, in one catastrophic misjudgement. It was Victorian day at school and McMini was all got up as a Victorian boy. He is small and mercurial, with blonde curly hair. The epitome of cute. But he can take a while to get ready. So we were a bit late and after a weekend gardening, I’m a bit stiff. Consequently, though I needed to get a wiggle on, it was a bit of a labour getting us going on the bike – he sits on a seat behind me – and we start out with a hill. It can be a bit of a grim haul sometimes, getting us up that hill. Today was particularly pants, I felt very stiff and tired and seemed to be going incredibly slowly.
However, I’m not so sure I was. I’ve got a lot fitter over the course of the term without noticing. So when I get to the top of the hill, I build up speed and go faster sooner. I did notice this a couple of days ago, when frustrated with my snail like speed I looked down and realised I was cycling up the hill at 12mph which, at the beginning of term, is about as much as I can achieve on the flat. I suppose the nub of it is that when I think I’m going quite slowly, I’m actually riding faster and it could be that my judgement has not caught up. Yes, this is the making excuses for myself paragraph. But despite noticing I was cycling faster in places, I hadn’t really hauled in the implication of what that meant.
So this morning, after creeping up the hill I am trundling along the top and I approach the cross roads at the top. It’s a pretty blind junction so I always slow right down and either stop completely or roll very slowly, so I keep a bit of momentum to get across and get going again. Today, I got there, slowed down, as I usually do. I saw a car coming up the road but it was far enough away not to worry and braked some more, saw nothing coming the other way and started pulling across the road. Then I noticed there was another car. Very close. Something a bit panicky happened about the braking, here. I recall worrying that I hadn’t gripped the levers; whether it was true or borne out of the shit-I’m-not-stopping aspect of it, I don’t know. But I remember consciously ditching Plan A: stop because I knew that I wasn’t stopping and that braking or no braking I was going to overshoot the junction into the oncoming car’s path.
“Shit!” I thought. “Not with McMini up.”
My brain dropped words after that. They took too long. Instead, a picture of us being pushed five yards along the tarmac, trapped under the bumper of the stopping vehicle flashed into my head. I had to get out of its path. I pedalled like fuck. She got our back wheel, there were about 4 inches in it I reckon. There was a massive bang, the back of the bike came round, I didn’t consciously put my foot down but I knew I had because I felt my knee pop and then we were on the road, and McMini was crying, but clearly fine and trying to get his seatbelt off and get up. I unclipped him and held him tight. Telling him it was OK. Telling myself it was OK when I knew damn well that I’d almost killed both of us.
The first thing everyone said; the policeman, the nurse, the doctor – if you’re going to get knocked down, outside a Doctor’s surgery is a very good place – was that it could have happened to anyone, that we all misjudge things. I know this is true. And I know that when I do stuff up, there’s nothing to be gained by worrying about it. Keep calm and carry on. But there are times when I wonder, because either I misjudge things a lot more than other people, or I’m unlucky enough to receive full retribution every time. The short of it is, I don’t usually get away with my misjudgements, or maybe I’m no different to anyone else, but just more prepared to admit it.
And what does this have to do with writing?
Well, all this made me think about how I write about pain and danger. I write them from my own experience. I have endured the kind of pain, in both knees, that has made me whimper and reduced me to tears. The most recent moment being just now, when I went to the freezer to get a frozen chicken out. I’d say there are levels of pain I haven’t experienced but I definitely cry at about level 6. The most pain I’ve ever experienced was, er hem, wind after a c section. Yes ladies, they don’t tell you about that. Sudden evil pain that makes you cry and apologise to everyone round you for the fact you’re rolling about about whispering swearwords under your breath – an 8 for that one. Gripe Juice fixes it in minutes.
So when I put my characters in pain, or danger, they tend to react the way I do. Because using my experience is the only way I can make it believable. But I’m not sure it would be believable to everyone, because we all react differently to peril and pain.
So far, though, through any amount of pain, my thoughts have always been clear. Likewise, in danger, though I may make the wrong call, I weigh up the situation before making a decision.
Likewise, in pain, I’ve always been able to think. Which means I probably haven’t experienced the heights of agony I might think.
To be honest, four out of five times in moments of peril I’ve had very clear concise thoughts. As usual, I was surprised after this morning, at how incredibly clear and fast my thoughts were. But also disappointed at how, if I’d just been that little bit smarter, I could have kept braking and turned the bike sideways, allowing the girl to move her car out round me. I think that in some ways, it’s rather harder to write dangerous situations realistically once you’ve been in some. Because the way they unfold is so different to the way you would expect. And I suppose that’s why you can only really make things in your plot work if you, yourself, can believe that they can. And I suppose that’s how so many of those mad 1960s shows like the Avengers, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and the like were so popular. Because while you have to have that grain of truth upon which to hang it all, it’s that writing with conviction, rather than what actually happens in real life, which allows us to suspend disbelief.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and have a bit of a lie down.
Hello everyone, this week, I’m delighted to welcome a guest poster on my blog. Many of you will have heard of Tahlia Newland. Today, she’s going to tell us a bit about how she writes and her new release. So, without more ado… take it away, Tahlia.
I used to be a visual artist (actually I still am, it’s just not my main income anymore), then I worked in Visual Theatre for over twenty years as a writer and performer, so visual imagery is not just important to me, it’s part of who I am as an artist. Visual Theatre communicates with visual symbolism and my Diamond Peak Series is full of symbolism, so though I’m writing instead of creating visual imagery with paint or with dance, costumes, sets, props, masks and music, my writing is full of visual imagery and symbolism.
I’m a visual author. I guess that’s why I like to write fantasy and magical realism.
Reviewers have said such things as “truly spectacular imagery;” “unique settings;” “a rich, detailed world building”, and “It’s a visual writing style – you can see the action”. About the symbolism they have said such things as; “author Newland exhibits great skill in allegorical storytelling;” and “an epic adventure with real world symbolism and depth.”
Stories come into my mind in a visual way as well. I see the scenes playing out as a movie and I write the scenes as they come into my head, so I don’t feel as if I’m making the story up, I’m more writing what I see. It makes me wonder if the stories aren’t happening somewhere in some other reality. Certainly in symbolic terms, the Diamond Peak series is played out in the psyches of every person on the planet whether we know it or not.
But the visual and written aspects of my creativity are even more linked than just how they come out in the final product. Part of my creative process in writing is to consider the book cover, and I use Photoshop to mock up different ideas at various stages of writing. Sometimes, I take a break from writing and play with Photoshop and what I come up with helps to clarify the images in my mind.
I’ve just released Demon’s Grip, the latest book in the Diamond Peak Series. I built up this cover with the help of my daughter at Centrepiece Productions Design Studio (a good place for cheap but professional covers).
Here’s the cover of Demon’s Grip, Tahlia’s new release.
It’s always best to start at the beginning of a series though, so to inspire you to do just that, book one in the series is only 99c until the 6th July on Kindle and Kobo, so pick it up and read your way to the top of Diamond Peak.
You can also pick up a FREE short story prequel to the Series here.
Tahlia Newland, the award-winning fantasy and magical realism author with a metaphysical twist. If you enjoyed this blog post, you can join her on Facebook , Twitter or Google+ You can even fan her on Goodreads. When not reading, writing, reviewing or mentoring authors you may find her being an extremely casual high school teacher or making decorative masks. Tahlia began writing full time in 2008 after twenty years in the performing arts and a five-year stint as a creative and performing arts teacher in a High School. In 2012, she set up the Awesome Indies List to showcase quality independent fiction. She has had extensive training in meditation and Buddhist philosophy and lives in an Australian rainforest south of Sydney. Creativity is her middle name!
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M T McGuire…
...humorous fantasy author. The books are quite funny too. MTM is old enough to know better but still checks inside unfamiliar wardrobes for a gateway to Narnia. None yet. Boring huh?
Few Are Chosen, K'Barthan Trilogy: No 1 has been awared the Awesome Indies Seal of Approval
Award Winning Author (Phnark).
A group of London teenagers judging the Wishing Shelf Book Awards awarded a silver award to Few Are Chosen, K'Barthan Trilogy: Part 1. Escape From B-Movie Hell was also voted a winner - of a bronze medal this time - in 2015.
M T McGuire grew up on a windy down but now lives in Bury St Edmunds, in Suffolk with her partner, son and a large hairy cat.
M T McGuire Authorholic 