Tonight, it’s another location from the book and, actually, another pub. This one’s the Pitcher and Piano, a converted church that is one of the most beautiful bars in the city. This pub sits at the top of the same cliff where the Loggerheads nestles at the bottom. As pubs go, the two places couldn’t…
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The Loggerheads Pub
The Loggerheads is one of my major settings in Dead Flowers. In fact, more action takes place there than anywhere else in this Nottingham-set novel. The first reviews are in and they’ve been lovely, which makes me very happy. One of my favourite comments so far was from The Bookbag about the setting. “Monaghan’s other…
Read MoreElvis
My new novel, Dead Flowers, is out later this week. In the run up to its release, I’m going to post a short blog every day about an aspect of the story. Today is all about Elvis. Elvis is my main character Sian’s dog, a retired cadaver dog who used to help the police find…
Read MoreWhat might have happened if R Kelly had been a member of a writer’s workshop
In today’s writing workshop, we’re going to look at R Kelly’s Ignition (remix) I enjoyed reading this piece of work and can certainly see that there’s a rhythm to the way you use words. I particularly liked the bouncing, tooting and beeping, which are lots of fun and encourage participation with the text. That said, I…
Read MoreWhat is crime fiction?
This week, on a course about Crime Fiction, we were asked the question ‘what is crime fiction?’ You’d have thought we’d know, since we’d signed up for a fairly significant chunk of education on the subject, but it was harder to answer than you might expect. It was really quite a clever bit of teaching,…
Read MoreKeeping on keeping on
It’s heading up for a decade since I was first published and there have been ups and downs but there is much to celebrate. There are a number of landmark celebration blog posts on their way. But in the meantime, here’s my latest YouTube video. Stephen King, showing how it’s done. A completely natural storyteller.…
Read MoreThe Ugly Truth of Publishing & How BEST to Support Writers
Some really good points here.
Read MoreTHE TROLL at Christmas: Post 2
My apologies, folks. I had promised to post this yesterday and ended up out with friends for most of the day and all evening. So here it is now. Chapter 1 of the the first novella in my TROLL series. Chapter 2 will be up early evening today. Enjoy… The book is currently available on amazon…
Read MoreThe Troll at Christmas
If you are a regular reader of this blog, or my facebook and twitter feeds, then you won’t have been able to miss that, this year, I wrote and published a trilogy of thriller novellas called THE TROLL. What you might not know is that the first story in the series is a Christmas story. Perhaps not quite so…
Read MoreSo, you want to be a writer?
I came across a video on YouTube today, a TED talk by Nathan Filer that pretty much said everything about writing a first novel that I would ever want to say. It’s perfect. You can watch it yourself, below. But to pick out a few key points. Your debut novel is unlikely to be your…
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