We’re blessed in Dumfries and Galloway to have the Wigtown Book Festival almost on our doorstep and I’m delighted to announce that this year I will be appearing as part of the official programme on Friday 30th September in the McNeillie Tent. It’s my first appearance at a literary festival so I’m looking forward to it and worrying about it in equal measure!

It’s also a chance for a first glimpse of the paperback cover! Hare House will be coming out in paperback the day before, on the 29th September, so look out for a copy in a bookshop near you.

Having had to cancel my own launch event for Hare House, I’m very excited to announce that I will be appearing at Gallovidia Books in Kirkcudbright on Wednesday 23rd February

This will be another ‘in conversation’ event, with a Q&A and a short reading. I really enjoyed the one I did at Booka in Oswestry (and I hope the audience did too) so I’m looking forward to it.

You can book here – tickets are £15 with a copy of Hare House included, or £7 without.

It’s been a long time coming, but Hare House is finally published!

Sadly, I can’t have a physical launch because of the pandemic, but I have put together a little trailer video with a short reading from the opening of the book

It’s inspired by the landscape of Dumfries and Galloway, which in turn inspired the book itself, so it seemed appropriate. I hope you enjoy it.

The hardback should be in all good bookshops, or you can order it online in a variety of formats via this page.

I’m very excited to announce my first ‘in person’ event to promote Hare House – on January 27th I’ll be doing an evening event at Booka in Oswestry, who’ve made Hare House their Book of the Month for January.

You can buy tickets at the bookshop or online – more details here.

I’m delighted to announce that my second novel, Hare House, is to be published by Mantle Books in 2022. More details to follow soon.

Today and tomorrow I shall be at WagTongues – Dumfries’s latest popup bookshop, the brainchild of the Dumfries and Galloway Writers’ collective.  As well as manning the till, I shall be reading from my own novel, Out of a Clear Sky and also introducing just a few of the many writers who have featured in the Fankle.

Getting the popup shop ready last night

If the event in September in Wigtown is anything to go by, it should be a great occasion and a chance not just to browse and buy but to meet a great many local authors great and small.

Looking good already

Anyone who’s coming to the lovely Wigtown Festival this weekend should keep an eye on its growing fringe programme. We’re lucky in Dumfries and Galloway to have a wealth of writing talent for a rural area that’s so thinly spread. I, with others from the Dumfries Writers’ group will be launching our 2012 anthology, Stretch of Imagination, at 12 noon on Saturday 6th October, at the Quakers’ Meeting House. This will be followed by the launch of Mary Smith‘s latest poetry collection, Thousands Pass Here Every Day as well as an afternoon of music and poetry and the launch of the latest Southlight. It will also be a chance to get your hands on the very latest copy of the Fankle.

If you come along, please do pop in to say hello and have a look at what is happening among the rolling hills of South West Scotland

I’ve long thought it would be useful to others to have a workshop helping people set up websites or blogs. While many people find it easy to work out how something like WordPress works just by reading the help or trying things out, for others it can be a bit daunting and instead they end up paying a lot of money for a website which they then struggle to maintain. So, with the generous support of CABN (Creative Arts and Business Network) Dumfries & Galloway, who provided the training facility, I spent this afternoon helping four fellow local writers set up websites and blogs of their own.

They are:

• Kriss Nichol
• Lesley Jackson
• David Mark Williams
• Gillian Villiers

Please go over and have a look – and encourage them to keep going! Some of them are quite new to the world of websites and blogs (and were looking a bit shellshocked by the end of the day) but I’m sure they’ll all get writing soon and it will definitely be worth hearing what they have to say.