Yesterday my new morris side, Sutton Masque – a mixed Border Morris side – welcomed in the official start of summer on the 1st of June by dancing outside a couple of pubs in Ely. It was freezing, rainy and grey. A hardy Greek family sat outside The Cutter, under the porch heaters and watched…
Research into the history of asexuality is only just beginning to gain any traction. Which is fitting, because it’s only in the last decade, really, that there has been an awareness that asexuality exists at all – and that awareness is very far from being widespread outside the LGBTQ part of the internet. We are…
I don’t actually watch The 100 or Sleepy Hollow. I had been hearing all about the Clarke and Lexa romance on Tumblr and thinking ‘maybe I should give this a chance, even though I don’t like post-apocalyptic or gritty.’ But then the next thing I heard was that they’d made the f/f romance canon and…
NGL, I kind of hate doing this. It feels bad to ask anyone who liked Blue Steel Chain to go and nominate it for the TRR Readers’ Choice Awards – Summer 2016. However, it obviously got into the pre-open nomination round by itself (because I didn’t know anything about this) and I have to admit…
A Post Not About Writing At All I had a lot of success with the Slimming World fat-free diet, which I stayed on for at least four years, losing three stone and keeping that weight off for two years afterwards. But when things got emotionally overwhelming in the later part of 2015 and not even…
I’m not sure what to say about this. In something of a bombshell, Samhain Publishing announced yesterday that they were in the process of winding down in order to eventually go out of business. This came as a surprise to me, as I was half way through my first pass of edits on Labyrinth, the…
I can’t say how delighted I am to hear that Blue Eyed Stranger made the list of best novels of 2015 at Romance Novels for Feminists! For a start, I’m overjoyed to know that my books qualify as romance novels for feminists at all, and then to be one of the best of the year…
First interview of 2016 goes to Dr Jo Stanley, FRHistS, for her fascinating blog Gender, sex, race, class – and the sea. “Using a cultural studies approach, this blog explores the impact of women, LGBT people, working-class people and people from a range of ethnic backgrounds, on the sea and shipping. And it questions the…
I was about to say that other than cleaning up my own mental act, I hadn’t done very much this year. But then the aforesaid mental cleaning kicked in and said ‘hold on there. Yes you have. Don’t put yourself down like that.’ So in obedience to my new determination to be slightly less horrible…
I am always reading Ursula LeGuin and today I got a new-to-me book of her essays called “Dancing at the Edge of the World.” It opens with an essay that gives me joy, given that I am a fifty year old going through the life threatening process of the menopause. LeGuin is not the only…
