Ride on the yokai train? I’d be too scared!

BAKE-DEN NI NOTTE Ride the “Transforming Train” YOKAI SUTORITTO E! To Yokai Street! The awesome artwork on the left is part of a promo for the Bake-den, a train service in Kyoto that occasionally features some spooky Japanese monsters, or yokai. Bakeru is a verb meaning  “to transform” (pronounced BA as in BARber;  KE as [...]

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First review is up!

The first review of Takeshita Demons is up on Amazon. It’s utterly terrifying to think that people who aren’t my mother or my editor or a select panel of competition judges are reading something I have written. For the first time my fiction is Out There and Public and Fair Game. Yikes. I don’t know [...]

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Editing your own work is like diagnosing your own heart disease

In this week’s post I’m probably going to include more mixed metaphors and cringing clichés than a pig has had hot dinners: I’ve spent most of the week editing Forests and Filth Lickers (we’re about 2/3 through the first draft!) and I just can’t be bothered editing anything else. Apologies in advance. At the end [...]

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The struggle to juggle; the joy of letting go

I was never turned on by recipes and shining bathrooms. Dishes were washed once a day, clothes about once a week. I unearthed the vacuum cleaner at most twice a year. When bored of cooking the stand-by spaghetti bolognaise, I’d toast a cheese sandwich or eat out. I was too busy to feign interest, too [...]

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