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I'm Back. Again.

Hi everyone.

You know you haven't blogged in a while when you can't remember your own blog address and have to find it via your website. Yes, I really did mean to blog regularly and yes, it really is September 2014 since I last posted anything. Oh well. The road to hell and all that as my late father would have said.

So Happy Diwali, Happy Halloween, Happy Bonfire Night, Happy Christmas and Happy New Year. Delete which not applicable.

I was actually shamed into starting to blog again when I came across Helen Yendall's wonderfully inspiring blog which you can read for yourself at https://blogaboutwriting.wordpress.com/ Helen writes the kind of posts I aspire to. Witty, concise, interesting , useful...Oh well, we can but try.

Anyway, enough rambling. Time to bring you up to date on where I'm at with my writing. My main news is that my non-fiction book based on the letters I inherited from my grandmother and which have a strong link to Downton Abbey, is at quite an exciting stage now. I've finally finished going through them all (it's only taken me four years!) and I've also done lots of background research and reading - so much so that I think I could probably go on Mastermind to answer questions about the Burghcleres and the Carnarvons. Might not be so hot on the General Knowledge though.

I'm now about to start on a proposal for literary agents (gulp!) and last week, I had my first "Press" which was a full page piece in my local paper, the Leicester Mercury. You can find the article at http://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/Maid-8217-s-letters-reveal-gossip-real-Downton/story-25830728-detail/story.html

The picture below is of Ethel North (my grandmother's friend who wrote all the letters and who was Lady Burghclere's ladies' maid and then close companion) on the trip she took to Egypt in 1928 with Lady Burghclere to visit Howard Carter and see the Tutankhamen relics.

I'll try and keep you "posted" on how things progress. I promise!


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