My Books. Buy Them
Touchstone (3. All the Time in the World)
Baby, baby, baby… you’re out of time… Rachel, lost and alone... read more
Ghosts on the Moor
Three women spend Christmas in a remote cottage on Dartmoor to escape problems... read more
Lovers in Paris
Can your love live up to the most romantic city in the world? It’s Disneyland... read more
Touchstone (2. Family at War) – a time travel Blitz story
The unforgettable fire… Continuing the adventures of Rachel and Danny, a... read more
Meet me in Montmartre
New Year’s Eve. An English girl. A French boy. A blind date. A kiss... read more
The Striker’s Fear of the Open Goal
Get a life. Get the girl. Get to Wembley. Ewan Glumie was born on the day Man... read more
The Budapest Breakfast Club
This summer: Go to Budapest… Make a movie… Have an affair. Ten... read more
The Very Thought of You
What happens when you fall in love with a woman who died before you were born?... read more
Train Can’t Bring Me Home
Love. Literature… and Tom Waits. Lots of Tom Waits. 1993. The former... read more
The Girl with the Bomb Inside
School is shit, your hero killed himself and your girlfriend’s pregnant.... read more
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Monthly Archives: October 2007
November is the cruellest month
November is almost upon us and with it comes that uneasy feeling I’ve had the last few years. That ‘why am I not writing a novel this November?’ feeling. Because November, in case you didn’t know it, is National Novel Writing Month. Or NaNoWriMo, as them what knows calls it. <taps nose> I realised today that I bought Chris Baty’s No Plot? No Problem! book not last year but two years ago, which means that I’ve missed two Nanowrimos, not …
The polyphonic (killing) spree
It wasn’t so much that Dexter had actually jumped the shark in its second season currently running on Showtime. But the outboard motor was running and the water skis were firmly strapped on. Something was stinking out this show in its first three episodes and it wasn’t one of the main character’s justifiable homicides. [You know there's going to be spoilers here, right?] The first hint that something was wrong came with the character of loveable Latino cop, Angel, who in …
Screenwriting matters
It may seem hardly worth comment to those of you who aren’t screenwriters, but when Universal last week put online six screenplays of recent hits they’re promoting for the upcoming awards season, it came like an unexpected bunch of flowers to the girl who never gets asked on a date. Which might give you an idea how undervalued screenwriters feel in the industry. At last, many of us thought, some recognition that the success of these films might actually have something …
The secret history of British film
John Patterson wrote a brilliant article recently bemoaning the UK adaptation industry in the wake of yet another foreign film being made from an obscure British novel neglected by our own filmmakers, who seem more concerned with churning out fodder for the chick lit/heritage conveyor belt. I like it because he mentions a lot of films that I regard as high points of the British film industry. When I think of British film I don’t find myself automatically thinking of Zulu and Get …
Sex and the pity
One of my favourite scenes about writers is the one with Woody Allen in The Front, in which he plays a bookie pretending to be a screenwriter (as a front for blacklisted writers), who thinks his new found status is going to get him laid. An attractive woman approaches him at the bar and asks ‘So what do you do?’ He smiles smugly and says ‘Heh. I’m a writer.’ She walks away. Writer Hank Moody has no such problems. But then …
