Christmas Cards

Since the beginning of December I have been getting a trickle of Christmas cards from friends and family. This is a lovely tradition, I always think, and it is such a pity that with the popularity of social media it is dying out.
As an ex-pat, living in Germany, I was often starved for news of friends who wrote once a year at Christmas and updated me on their lives. Even more valuable were those who gave me a thumbnail sketch of what was going on in the country they were living in. Of course, you had the one-liners who simply wrote on the expensive Christmas card "we are all well" and added a pious hope that my family were equally healthy and happy. But even these few lines meant that they had thought about me and my family for a couple of minutes at the very least: they had to pick a card to send from the pile they had bought  and in order to write something, they had to call me to mind. I am a great believer in the power of thought or prayer if you want a better word. I remember when I was in hospital following surgery for breast cancer that I could almost feel the get-well wishes pouring out to me.
But I digress. So here I am thinking about the niceness of receiving Christmas cards and the fun of reading how those friends and family who only contact me once a year are doing. How was it all those years ago, when receiving a letter at any time was a big event? When the post coach with its four horses plied between the cities and towns and delivered news of loved ones far away?In those days, far away really meant just that. Many Irish people who emigrated to the USA never came home again. All they and their families had were these letters, cards and well wishes, all of which were read over again until the next time.
I sometimes think that we kept in touch to a much better extent before the advent of email, whatsapp, skype, etc. Letter-writing is an art, of course, and there were people who, because of the lack of education or abilities, simply could not write a very coherent account of themselves. Nowadays they'd simply send you an emoji - enough said!
I still write Christmas letters to friends or family members who I don't get to see very often. These are getting fewer, though, I have to admit. This is partly due to the fact that the cost of travelling has really come down over the years, and let's face it, it's much nicer to see people face to face than to write to them.
This year I have written all my Christmas letters and sent off all my cards except the very local ones. I hope I have made a few people as happy as I am to hear from them.

Buddy Can You Spare Me A Smile?

I've been travelling. This is not a major thing in itself, I hasten to say, I often travel and this year has seen me make two non-scheduled trips. So, what was different about this time? I think that travelling in the summer months, when tourists are mixing happily with the locals, is different from travelling in November before the Christmas markets start.


What do I mean about travelling being different in November? I'll try and explain. I stayed at a hotel in the heart of Frankfurt. It is very convenient, being near the Zeil, the main shopping area, where you can buy anything you fancy and things you never knew you wanted. I travelled several times on the Underground and on the suburban trains. In summer with lots of excited tourists, it wasn't so obvious  but this time with mainly locals coming and going, I noticed the difference. What struck me most was that people put on what I call their "travel face", that blank look, eyes glazed over, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. I noticed the same thing at the airports. Some people read books or Kindles, others flick through their phones in an attempt to distract themselves until they have to get off the train or their flight is called. Far too many plug in their music and can't hear a thing. All of which is understandable at least in part, but why that grim expression? No one cracks a smile not even if an acquaintance/work colleague sits down beside them - they simply nod acknowledgement and go back to their phone or book or whatever. We are all on the same planet but side by side and not together.

Whenever I visit Frankfurt I plan on making two people smile whether they like it or not. It was hard going this time around. In the end a young man (clearly a foreigner) smiled at me when he held the door of the Kaufhof department store for me. The cashiers resolutely refused to twitch so much as a lip muscle. I bought German bread Bauernbrot, a sort of sourdough loaf which I just love to eat when it is fresh. I asked the guy at the counter if he could slice it for me and he gruffly replied that that wouldn't work because it was too fresh and would crumble. End of conversation. Take it or leave it.

Happy Ending: when I showed up at Security at Frankfurt Airport I was literally the only one there - the flight was half empty, as it turned out, and people were either ahead of me or came later. So here was I with a team of grim-faced Security personnel. In fact, they were joshing each other and having a great time and so we got talking and laughing (who'd have thought it?) and they assured me - and I believe it - that a sense of humour is vital for doing their job.  This encounter gave me a feel-good feeling for the rest of the day.

I think we should have a smile day at least once a week, let's say on Mondays when everyone is feeling a bit grumpy about having to go back to work after the weekend. Let's all try it and see what results we get.

Finding the Right Words

I think nearly all writers share a love of words. We write a sentence and then listen to it in our minds, checking for rhythm and sense. If one word jars, then we search until we find a more suitable word or we rewrite the sentence. I have just rewritten the first sentence of this blog: originally I wrote All writers share a love of words and are grammar freaks. Then I re-read it and thought that not all writers do love words and quite a lot of writers that I know are not keen on the rules of grammar. And I wondered if I should put a hypen between re-written or just leave it as rewritten. So I've done the hyphen for re-read although I might still change that, too, when I read this blog again.
Does it matter? you might ask and rightly so. As long as the reader understands me, I'm not going to beat myself up over it. But, I have to admit, I do like to pay attention to grammar. I see red when I read something like The Grapes' of Wrath instead of The Grapes of Wrath, or Marys' dress when it should be Mary's dress. Or he was sat in the chair (and I've seen this in a best seller recently) instead of he was sitting in the chair. But maybe I'm old fashioned. Maybe I should get out more.

All of this went through my head yesterday when I saw, for the umpteenth time, an advertisement for something or other which had the words get your free gift. A gift is free, that is why it is a gift. So what is a free gift and should you trust a company who might not know exactly the meaning of the word gift? You could end up getting a bill for something you thought was free.
And another thing that caught my eye: exclusive offer. Exclusive to whom, exactly? If everyone on the internet reads the advertisement, then it is hardly exclusive, is it?
I am always hearing about jobs being up for grabs. Really? Isn't this just a position that is vacant and you can apply for it? It's time we changed that expression. Newspaper headlines tell us a politician or other public personality has been slammed for saying or doing something. Wouldn't the word criticized tell me the same thing and less violently at that?

Let's get more creative in our speech. A friend of mine was recently describing a very tidy, efficient acquaintance and she ended with the words : "she'd mind mice at the crossroads for you."
What a great expression! I just love it and I have been trying ever since to see where I could fit it into one of my stories.

Halloween and Childhood Memories

On Friday night I went to watch the fireworks which opened Youghal's Halloween festivities. There was a full moon and the tide was in, the water reflecting eerily in the moonlight. It was the perfect setting.
Looking back on my own childhood, Halloween was pretty low key. Fancy dress costumes were not on sale in every store as they are now and there was no such thing as trick or treat. It was mostly celebrated at home. We bobbed for apples and as far as I remember there might have been a ghost story or two broadcast on the radio and also published in the popular magazines (we didn't have a television until I was a teenager).
For me, at any rate, the biggest thing was the barm brack. This is a yeasted bread with added sultanas and raisins. Traditionally, each barmbrack contained a pea, a stick, a piece of cloth, a small coin (originally a silver sixpence) and a ring. This was a form of fortune telling in which each item, when received in the slice, was supposed to foretell the fate of the person who received it: the pea, the person would not marry that year; the stick, would have an unhappy marriage or continually be in disputes; the cloth or rag, would have bad luck or be poor; the coin, would enjoy good fortune or be rich; and the ring, would be wed within the year. As children, we were very competitive. I remember once getting the stick and being highly upset about it and teased by my siblings. At school next day we always compared what we had found in the barm brack and word would quickly go round that so-and-so had found the coin. I was never lucky enough to find the silver coin. In those days sixpence would have seemed like a small fortune to me!
When I bought a barm brack the other day, I discovered it did have a toy wedding ring. I expect that the other items are no longer allowed for safety reasons. At any rate, the wrapper on this barm brack warned about swallowing the toy ring by mistake. But I am not going to start moaning about lost innocence or the necessity of food safety regulations. Halloween is still a lot of fun and it is refreshing to see that kids still like dressing up and painting their faces. Some things never change.

Keeping on Writing

I have been away in Holland on holidays at the beginning of the month. Before I left, I told myself I would not start re-writing my novel until I returned home. I have now been back over two weeks and still have not got round to it.
Writing is a habit. Every morning I get up and work on a novel. Or so it has been up until now. Yes, there are always days when I don't get round to it but they are few and far between. I do believe I am addicted to writing and suffer withdrawal symptoms if I am not working on something.
Thus, I have been plaguing myself for not doing anything these past few weeks. I have, in fact, talked myself into a guilty conscience. 
Today, I resolved to get down to revising the first chapter of this novel tomorrow. I originally titled it FREEFALL but there are a number of novels with this name out there and someone once told me that it could be classified under ''hobbies - parachuting''.  It is a thriller and although I hope it will keep readers on their toes, it has nothing to do with choosing a hobby.
I know that when I get started, I have a lot of work to do because although the original manuscript got some positive criticism, it does need a lot of work. But that is the writing life. You have an idea, you write up your first draft, read it over, make changes, come up with the second draft and so it goes. Like most writers, I am never one hundred percent satisfied. I usually work on as many as ten drafts of any novel until I feel I have got it right. This can mean deleting thousands of words. But it is all fun and that feeling when the words flow, can't be beaten.

What am I doing tonight? Well, now that you ask, I'm going to curl up for an early night and finish reading Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. I love that feel-good effect her novels produce and when I finish reading one of them, I often take a break from picking up another book to read. Looks like I'll be back on track with my writing.
In the meantime, my Christmas novella is available in paperback on Amazon and will be available as a Kindle in mid-November which proves I have done some work this year. Here's the cover. See what you think.

Get Down to Writing Tip No.5

Last tip of this series: I promised to have a look at publishing.
Fact No. 1 is that it is very hard to get published these days.
Fact No. 2 is that if you persist and you are good enough, the chances are high that you will find an agent and eventually a publisher.
Fact No. 3 is that you can self-publish, using Amazon's CreateSpace for a paperback or KDP for a Kindle version of your work. This requires computer skills, an excellent knowledge of grammar and an idea of how to market your work. Or you can get a company specializing in this to do it for you.

So now you have written your Red Riding Hood novel and think it is good enough to send out to an agent. If you can afford it, get an editor to go over your manuscript. If you can't afford it, get a few good friends to read it and if one of them is a whizz kid on spelling and grammar, so much the better. Sloppy writing, as agents often refer to it, i.e., writing that is full of grammatical errors or which is illogical (for example: calling one of the main characters John, an orphan, in the first ten chapters and then changing his name to Jeff with five siblings by the end of the book - you think this doesn't happen? - believe me, it does!) is a big turn-off for agents. If you have your story checked, obvious errors will be weeded out and the agent can concentrate on the story you are telling and on your style of writing.

First thing is to research agents. There is no point in sending Red Riding Hood to an agency which only deals in women's fiction or horror.
In addition to finding an agency which deals in the kind of book you have written, it is advisable to research who they represent.  This will give you an idea of what they like - agencies have preferences, too.
The agents themselves (and I have met and chatted with many leading UK agents) are human beings not monsters. They are looking for THE NEXT BIG THING and until they find it, they are looking for an author who can write a novel every year which will hit the publishing mid-list and bring in revenue for them and for the author.  When you have accepted that fact, it gets easier, I feel.

Once you have chosen your agent and checked out their website for what they require, your next thorny task is to write a synopsis and then a covering letter. Every writer has groaned over a synopsis - what to say what to leave out. A good solution is if you can get your long-suffering friends to write one and then go through what they have written. There are websites and books which give tons of useful hints. Agents will tell you that, knowing the difficulties here, they will skim over synopsis and concentrate on the covering letter.
A covering letter should be one page with around three short paragraphs. In your covering letter you should introduce yourself very briefly, state the name of your novel and the genre - this will be crime in Red Riding Hood's case - and having done your homework you can add something like "the story will appeal to readers who like Agatha Christie" or better still name an author the agent represents provided of course that your story is in that genre and of that type (hard-bitten, cozy mystery,police procedural, etc.).  As you can see, you really need to know quite a bit about what is on the market and the publishing terms for it.
Be prepared to get a standard letter with a refusal. When the agent writes a few lines such as "liked your story but don't feel it is right for our list", you are getting places. I have been lucky in the past where agents have taken the time to point out a few mistakes or given me advice on finding another agent.
Above all:  develop a thick skin.  Don't take it personally.

If you prefer you can open an account with KDP and publish your book with Amazon as a Kindle e-book.You will need reasonable computer skills to do this and it is advisable to get a professional cover design for the book. KDP will also convert your Kindle book into a print on demand paperback. Or you can use CreateSpace instead. CreateSpace will convert to Kindle e-book as well as paperback.
It is very difficult to sell books like this without doing a lot of marketing. If you are prepared for the long haul, this way of publishing can be very rewarding. You are in command of what you write, are not tied to deadlines, you don't have an editor who wants you to change and correct your manuscript. It is very important, however, to present your book as professionally as possible. There are many complaints from readers on Amazon about bad spelling and bad grammar. Despite our fast-paced world of communications and texting, readers still do notice this.

Above all, whichever path you take, do your absolute best to produce a quality product. Most important of all:  have fun!

GetDown to Writing Tip No. 4

Now that you've got your characters, their names and what makes them tick all sorted and you know how the story is going to develop, it's time to take the plunge and start writing.

Where to start? Every author starting off a story has sat down to a blank page. The good news is that you can start at the beginning, in the middle or do the ending first. What you have to do is to make the story interesting to your readers.
If you area a seat-of-the-pants writer, you'll write a couple of pages to start off the story : Red Riding Hood walking through the woods on her way to her grandmother's. Sounds pretty dull, doesn't it?  What if she feels she's being followed? Or she hasn't heard from her grandmother in a while, which is uncharacteristic. There's a rustling in the bushes, last summer's leaves crackle underfoot, a bird calls in the distance signalling that it has been disturbed by something. Now you're on the way to getting a bit of tension.
If you are a planner, then you will have outlined your chapters, so now you have to write what you planned. The same applies as for the seat-of-the-pants writer. You have to draw in your readers and make them wonder what is going to happen next.
More importantly, you have to make them care enough about Red Riding Hood to want to know how things work out.  I have read or tried reading to be more exact, stories with excellent plots but where the main character was so lifeless that I couldn't have cared less what happened to them.
Develop your characters, this is vitally important.  You can fudge the plot any way you like, but characters are what drives the engine.
So now you have written the first three pages or so. Tomorrow you may look at these and clap a hand to your forehead: what was I thinking?  Don't worry, this is all part of the process. Every writer worth their salt has to delete, change, add to everything they write. This gets easier as you go along, by the way.
So, off you go. Write and then write some more. Don't look back, you can change just about anything. You might find half way through Chapter Ten that another character steps out of the shadows, one that you hadn't actually planned on. This happened to me while writing my Christmas novella (Christmas at Castledarra available on Amazon around the middle of October) and I had to re-write chunks of the story.
The golden rule is that the story can be anything you want it to be. Give it your best, always. And enjoy every minute of its creation.
In my final tip on writing I will discuss getting published.

Get Down to Writing Tip No. 3

In my last blog I talked about planning or not planning each chapter. The most important thing is that you know how your story is going to end.  Little Red Riding Hood is going to be rescued by the forester and Grandmama will be caught along with her accomplice the Big Bad Wolf.

Your readers will only be interested in this story if they have some kind of feeling for your heroine. If she is a cardboard figure, without any interesting traits, then they are going to close your book after a couple of chapters. "I couldn't get into this" is a common remark on reviews although the reasons why are not always explained.

First of all, though, you have to have your characters lined up in your head and each one will be different from the other, will speak and think differently. So you have quite a bit of work to do. The best way to get it all straight is to use index cards, loose sheets of paper, or a tidy notebook and start writing down names and ideas for the people in your story. The following are obviously just suggestions to get you started.

Red Riding Hood is 18 years old, goes to college, is bright and friendly and very kind (this last is demonstrated by her bringing food to her grandmother). She is of medium height, blonde hair, blue eyes (obviously she can be anything you like: dark-skinned, black hair, brown eyes, or red-haired with freckles and green eyes or tall and skinny or small and plump - it is your call).
She is headstrong, likes to have her own way. Is unhappy when her father re-marries.
She likes to sing aloud as she walks through the woods. You will need some time to think up other stuff  so just leave the description for now and go on to the next important character.
The Forester works in the woods looking after the trees and wild animals. He is tall and muscular. He has been in love with Little Red Riding Hood for months now, loves to hear her sing. But he's a rough diamond so feels he can't approach this girl. Again, leave this and go back to it later on.
Next comes Grandmama and then The Big Bad Wolf. These last two are the villains in the piece and give the central plot of the whole novel so you need to spend time on 1) motive for what they plan on doing and 2) their characters and why they got to be like this.  In my last post we decided that Grandmama is the step mother pretending to be ill, she wants to get rid of Little Red Riding Hood in case she inherits her father's fortune. Every baddie has to have a redeeming feature to make them realistic.  (Remember the James Bond villain with the cat on his lap?) Grandmama maybe feeds  orphaned squirrels or looks after a sick stray cat.
The Big Bad Wolf is an ex-con who Grandmama has hired to kill Red Riding Hood. He is going to be a violent person but you can give him some redeeming feature. He is being paid for his work but just supposing he falls for Grandmama and hopes to persuade her to run away with him.  Let your imagination work here. You'll end up understanding what makes your characters tick and you'll even develop a bit of sympathy for the baddies.

Choosing names can be a headache. Half way through, you might suddenly decide that calling the forester Hugo is not one of your best ideas. Remember, you can change all the names in the middle of the story.  With a click on the Word Find/Replace feature it has never been easier. - just be sure to change them in your notes so you don't get confused.

When you have named all your story people return to the notes you made on their characters and add or subtract what feels right.
The next step is starting to write the novel.  One more thing: you can change all the rules as you go along. Whatever works for you is the right way of doing things.

Get Down to Writing No. 2

So now you have thought about what kind of novel you want to write. You've written down a one-sentence idea which goes something like: Grandma was in cohoots with the big bad wolf. 
Where do you go from here? Where do you even start a novel using that idea?
It's not as difficult as it sounds. First of all, in order to get a plot of some sort, you will need to ask the essential question: what if? 
What if grandma wasn't Little Red Riding Hood's real grandmother?
Now you have got the germ of a plot for your story. The next few questions follow logically:
If she wasn't the real grandmother, then who was she? Why do she and the wolf work together? What is her relationship to the wolf? Is he the ringleader or is she?
You could think up a lot of plot lines using that technique. Pick one that appeals to you, let's say you start to answer the first question: Grandma was really the stepmother and pretends to be ill in order to lure Little Red Riding Hood to her cottage where the wolf is lying in wait. 
Why? Because she  wants her out of the way in case she inherits her father's fortune.

Now comes the hard work of writing a 300-page novel based on that plot. There are two popular ways of writing a story.

1. You plan out all the chapters, who is doing what, when and where.
2. You develop the story as you go along - a word of caution here, you have to know where your story is going for this to work. You can't decide at page 110 that Grandma is the "good guy", not if you want the story to be believable (it's OK if you decide it from the beginning so that you can build in clues for your reader)

I use method no. 2 which means that I spend a lot of time writing and re-writng and mulling over where the story is going at any particular time, although I know how it will end.
For example, in the above story plot,  I would know that Grandma gets caught out and that there will be an exciting finish with Little Red Riding Hood fighting for her life. What happens inbetween needs to be written in a way that carries the reader along.
If you use method no. 1,  you will spend a lot of time planing out what is going to happen, chapter by chapter.
Either method doesn't provide any shortcuts to the business of writing.

You don't need to start worrying about what kind of writer you are, any method that works for you is fine. I simply wanted to demonstrate two methods to get you started on that idea in your head.

Every story needs characters. In my next blog I will have a look at developing characters for your novel.
Have fun!

Get Down to Writing that Novel

Recently I've talked to a few people who told me they intended writing a novel. When I enquired further as to what kind of novel and if they had an outline plot, they were vague. I got the feeling that they thought it was a momentous task involving blood, sweat and tears.
What I want to say today is: if you have an idea for a novel, no matter how sketchy, just write it down even if it only reads Grandma was really in cohoots with the wolf. By the way, that is an intriguing idea for a story!
Let the germ of the idea wander around in your brain. Then go out and buy a fancy notebook and write it down again at the top of the page. My guess is that, by then, a few more ideas will have popped into your head. Start listing your questions/ideas to develop the plot. Where does Little Red Riding Hood figure in all this? Who is the big bad wolf really?  FBI agent? Baddie? 
Then start your story if you are a seat-of-the-pantser or if you are a planner, start planning how the story could evolve. (I'll talk more about this in my upcoming blogs).
Grandma meets the big bad wolf and they discover they want to get rid of Red Riding Hood. Why? Because grandma wants her inheritance. Or Red Riding Hood knows what secret grandma has in her past or Red Riding Hood is a detective on the trail of the big bad wolf.
You can take your story anywhere you like.  You can change it at any time. The same rules apply to romance: girl meets guy, obstacles against them getting together: she is engaged to someone else and has set a date for the wedding or they are work colleagues/rivals and sparks fly from the beginning of their acquaintance.
Sure it's all been done before - but not by you. And there's the difference. Only you have a unique voice to tell the story in a different way to everyone else. I have read dozens and dozens of authors, some talented, some formulaic and dull. What makes a really good writer stand out? Their style, their unique voice. Compare  three classics: Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier and The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger and To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee. You could never confuse them with any other writer, could you? I don't think you could.
But you don't have to aim that high. First of all write down the bones of your story and maybe play around with the first chapter. It's always hard to know where to begin. I'll write more about that in my next blog.

Long Hot Summer in Ireland

We are in the middle of a heatwave in Ireland. We have hardly had a drop of rain since the beginning of June. This might be a normal state of affairs for wherever you live, dear reader, but in Ireland it is the top news. Here on the Emerald Isle we expect patchy summers, a day or two of rain, a day or two of sunshine and then back to damp and wet again. But weeks and weeks where we wake up to sunny mornings and blue skies? Now that is a novelty.

I went shopping this morning and everyone I met had a word to say about the weather - most of it very positive. We had a festival here in town and it was so wonderful to be able to stay out late and listen to the band without shivering under an umbrella (and truth to tell, being almost the only person out there ....). And that wonderful night sky promising yet another fine day.

It's very hard to get down to writing - I am still working on my Christmas novella but who can concentrate on frosty mornings on days like these?
The weather has a very positive aspect - it is too hot to eat much so I am making salads of all varieties and drinking lots of water which makes me feel very virtuous! Yes, it is all sunshine and happiness here and I am going to enjoy every minute of it as long as it lasts.

Crime in the Mountains - the first Sergeant Alan Murray Mystery Novel

I started my first Sergeant Alan Murray Mystery novel Death in a Lonely Place several years ago following a visit to Killarney in Co. Kerry.


Link to Amazon.com 

I remember standing on the side of a steep hill and looking down at the lakes below and thinking that this would be a good place to hide a body. The wildness of the mountains - that great mass of land towering above us - intrigued me. And so Sergeant Alan Murray was created.
I invented the village of Ballyamber where he lives and I reckoned that his wife went missing on a climbing trip on one of those majestic mountains several years before my story began. I had no idea what had happened to her, I only knew that she disappeared without trace.
Next, I started to write a novel about a woman who went missing in the area and from there the story took over. Other characters appeared from nowhere, or so it seemed:  the gossipy Mrs. Quinn, timid Helen looking to start a new life and her domineering boss Amy, Major Johnson and his wife Kim. My special favourite is Murray's assistant, Jim Flynn who is young and motivated and does not have too much patience with how some of the investigation is going. They all crowded into the story with their own joys and sorrows.
In the background is the mountain - fictitious - call Ardnabrone which is reputed to claim three lives a year. Ardnabrone means the "hill of sorrow" and so it proves to be in all three novels in the Sergeant Alan Murray series.
Some of my readers have said "I thought I was there, right in the middle of it all". Many readers are asking when the next novel in the series will appear. The answer to that is that I do not know. I had intended Death in a Lonely Place to be a stand-alone novel but it proved so popular that I wrote the second one, Ending in Death and then I just had to find out what had happened to Alan Murray's wife and I wrote A Cold Case of Murder.
All three novels are available on Amazon as e-books and as paperbacks.

Twitter me this - a tongue-in-cheek-view

I visit Twitter once or twice a day and I am not one of your prolific tweeters. I don't have many followers, I prefer my account to be exclusive. I do tweet this blog so that my readers know it is updated.
Today I had a bit more time on my hands, having finished the second draft of my Christmas novella CHRISTMAS WISHES, so I started touring Twitter. I checked out #Fridayfeeling and had to smile. You get just about everything under any hashtag heading and this one is great. I read that writing is a gift, is hard work, is for posterity, is for eternity, is wonderful, is the source of happiness. That left me breathless and exhausted so I got a glass of water.
I checked out a few more hashtags including #heatwave and learned that in #Ireland and #England everyone is affected by these hot temperatures. Water shortages, sunburn, not drinking enough, feeding ice cream/water melon to your dog, crowded beaches, tarmac melting on some roads, tips for sleeping in a hot bedroom. And there are complaints against those who complain that it is too hot. In Ireland people are smugly tweeting that it's hotter than Spain or the Algarve. So I slapped on some more sun cream and topped up the glass of water.
I looked at other tweets and learned that most Britons say "sorry" about 2 million times in their lives. How can you check the accuracy of that statement? I ask myself. And more importantly, do I care? What am I doing scrolling through all these tweets from people who seem to have even more time on their hands than I do? You know what? I'm getting out the suncream, that awful unfashionable sun hat and heading for one of those overcrowded beaches - oh, almost forgot that bottle of water.
Have a fun weekend everyone wherever you are in whatever temperature.

The World Cup in Russia and what Writers can get out of it.

Too many years ago to admit exactly how many, the boyfriend of one of my flatmates asked me if I minded if he watched a World Cup soccer game while she was getting herself ready to go out. I started moaning about "nothing but football" to be seen on television for the next month and he said "football is a great game" and proceeded to explain all the rules to me: offside, what's a penalty, what's good play, etc. etc. He made it so interesting that I was hooked from the start and since that time I have tried to watch every game of this competition. (As far as I know, my flatmate and her boyfriend lived happily ever after and I never laid eyes on him again - not such an interesting ending as you, dear reader, might have thought...).
My point here is simply that he had the ability to make something in which I was not remotely interested so intelligible and make me want to see how it all played out in the match we were watching. That is a talent that good writers possess: they reel you in from the first page and you stay happily with them as they take you on the journey they have written.

The World Cup is exotic, flamboyant, heartbreaking, fun. It's all there: drama, pathos, penalties given and penalties denied, tears, and triumph.You never know how a game is going to go. And you have the big stars and the players who stand out - there is always one player no one noticed before who saves the day, gets that vital goal and makes himself the hero of the hour. You get carried along with the excitement. If you can inject some of these emotions into your writing, you can hook your reader just as I was hooked into watching soccer.
There is no other competition that grabs me in the same way and I've got a whole month to enjoy it all!

On the Street in Big Cities

I am currently reading Lifeless by Mark Billingham. It was first published in 2005 but it is as relevant today as it was then. It is about homeless people being murdered on the streets of London and a detective going underground to try and solve the crimes. Having lived in London, I know the places in the book. Not only that, but a few years ago I attended a writers' event in the West End and was intrigued to see how many people chose to sleep in the doorways of theatres (as the protagonist in the novel) or in sheltered doorways around Covent Garden. I suppose it makes sense to pick a quiet but well-lit spot.
You can substitute London for Paris or any big city. Last weekend I was in Frankfurt. The suburban train tunnel around the city centre was closed for much-needed repairs which meant I had to take quite a detour to get to where I wanted to go and I got to see a lot of the inner city. Frankfurt has its fair share of homeless. They frequent the main shopping area, Zeil, which some people say is the most expensive mile in Europe. Be that as it may, for writers like me, it was rich in interesting detail. I saw a man sprawled in the middle of the pedestrian zone, totally oblivious of the sun on his face (and it was getting to be pretty hot by 10 o'clock in the morning), he rolled over and woke up as I moved past him and I was surprised to find that he looked well dressed for someone on the street. Maybe he'd been out on a binge. I saw a young lad with two plump little dogs who looked altogether in better shape than he was, several professional beggars and the inevitable addicts hoping to get enough for their next fix, tired people, people who stared at us from expressionless eyes.  I found myself wondering what they thought of all the luxury in evidence in the big stores and expensive boutiques around them.

I arrived late and had to change trains at the main railway station - never a healthy place to be on your own late at night. The city is a different place at night when the office workers are safely at home in suburbia and the street dwellers take over. I saw people rummaging in refuse bins for thrown-away food, one old lady who discovered a cigarette butt and looked at it with obvious delight, another woman sitting on a bench and having an earnest conversation with an invisible person next to her. A man gave vent to his inner rage and shouted abuse at everyone who walked past him.

Where do they all come from the Beatles asked in their song All the Lonely People? It would have been good to sit down and talk to some of them and hear their stories. I couldn't help thinking that Mark Billingham had got it absolutely right in his novel Lifeless. In the acknowledgements he thanked some of those he had spoken to and certainly his descriptions are true to life. Not only does he tell a good story, he also shows compassion for the street people and is never the slightest bit judgemental in his writing. While negotiating the tram or the train late at night in Frankfurt, I was often reminded of his novel.

My novels are set in the Irish countryside. There are no street people. But there are lonely people, people with problems, people who kill. I try to bring these elements to my Sergeant Alan Murray mysteries.

Say no to nicotine

May 31st is Say No to Nicotine Day. I gave up smoking twelve or more years ago and I was a chain smoker. I remember one very busy job in export when I had four phones, four ashtrays next to them and a cigarette burning in each. Once in a while the Managing Director would show up and say "you know you're not allowed to smoke here, don't you?' To which I always replied 'Oh, yes, I do know.' And I carried on puffing.
Do I miss smoking? Well, no not really. There is really only one cigarette that you absolutely enjoy if you are completely honest and that is the first one in the morning before your mouth - and breath - start to taste like the bottom of a parrot cage. Everything else you don't taste, you just need to get enough nicotine and stuff into your system.
Whenever something upset me, I reached for a cigarette as some kind of antidote. Did it help? No, never did. Why did I think puffing on a cigarette might help in a crisis? Hard to say, really. Certainly logic didn't have anything to do with it.
Am I glad I stopped smoking? You bet.
Was it hard to give up? Not really. Of course I stopped smoking when I first got married and in both my pregnancies. I tried stopping a good few times after that but without success. Then one day I bought a copy of Alan Carr's book which was in a sale. I consigned it to the back of my bookcase and meant to have a look at it in the distant future. But it sort of haunted me, knowing it was there. Everyone of my acquaintance who had stopped smoking attributed it to this book. It was kind of scary. Do I want to read it and stop smoking or do I want to continue smoking and read it when I'm around 80 years old or possibly later? In the end curiosity won out and I started reading it. Half way through I knew I was going to be able to stop.
I still remember when I had my last cigarette. Not your midnight, tomorrow is a new day stuff. I had three cigarettes left one Saturday morning. I finished my breakfast and smoked my usual cigarette. Went shopping, did a bit of housework, had the second last one. Then I sat out in the Spring sunshine on my balcony, made myself a cup of tea and took out the last cigarette and smoked it.  .
My family didn't notice I had stopped. I wasn't cranky. Yes, I felt something was missing for a few days. At work it was strange not to go downstairs with the smokers and hover at the side of the building (I worked in a no smoking building as you will have gathered). But I got accustomed to it all much faster than I had imagined.
I am so glad I stopped smoking!

The Royal Wedding and Showing and Telling

Were you one of the millions around the world who watched the Royal Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle? I know I did and I thoroughly enjoyed the romance of it. It all went off very well, as people are forever saying about weddings.
Ever since King Richard III cried 'A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse' in Shakespeare's play everyone has been associating the Royals with horses. The Queen and the Queen Mother all owned racehorses and attended Royal Ascot, arriving in a horse-drawn coach. Prince Harry and Meghan were driven in the Royal coach with the Windsor greys pulling it. Did you see that one grey horse of the escort behaving badly? He really gave his rider a hard time the whole journey to and from Windsor Castle. It is those little things on the fringe of events which interest me because they make it all so much more human.

Writers very often use these little snippets to illustrate a point. Anton Chekhov famously wrote "don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass". His advice has been passed on countless times to aspiring writers in order to demonstrate "show don't tell".  A smile, a frown, can all convey so much more than a whole paragraph of writing. Everyone with lip-reading talents craned to see what Prince Harry might have said to Meghan or she to him during the ceremony. I would have preferred to see the faces of some of the other Royals, or at least more of them, as the ceremony progressed. In general, though, when the cameras were trained on the invitees, it all appeared to be the same as a normal gathering of this sort.  People chatting easily with people they knew, somewhat stilted looking small talk among other groups (I'm going by body language here!) and one or two guests in the background not speaking to anybody. This is meat and drink to the writer. Watching people in conversation whether in the shops, on the bus or in a restaurant is an excellent way to learn how we all interact. Even a debate on television can be very illuminating and provide loads of ideas for writing conflict into situations in your novel or short story. Like all writers, you just have to be aware of the world around you.

Help Yourself!

I have just been looking at the top 20 bestselling books on Amazon.com. Several of these books are what used to be called "self-help": how to live your life successfully. There are also a few books on diet and nutrition.
I remember reading somewhere that when Dale Carnegie started his evening classes for salesmen, he discovered that many of his students had basic problems with getting along with their fellow humans. Listening to the stories told in class, he identified key areas where many people go wrong. And he wrote his book How to make friends and influence people.
The next thing that Carnegie discovered was that his students had lots of worries. Again, listening to their problems and interviewing prominent people to get their experiences of coping with worry, he published How to stop worrying and start living. 
The point I am making here is that nothing has really changed. Apparently we still need books to help us. Every year there are new theories about what to eat and when and how to eat it. And there are, as I said at the beginning, all these works on how to manage your life. So, have we learned anything, despite all these tomes of wisdom? Are we all still looking for some magic formula for living? And if we are, will we ever find it?

Exercise - who me?

I remember when those fitness temples started years ago. Everyone was attending some form of training. My daughter and a friend of hers cajoled me into joining a local gym because three people got a colossal discount on the membership fee. I have to admit that while I will sit down every morning and hammer out between 1,000 to 2,000 words of a novel (that's roughly 4 or 5 pages, I think), I am notoriously undisciplined about everything else. I eat more chocolate than is good for me, for one thing, and I keep putting off things like tidying drawers or cupboards or even doing a full clean of my apartment until I am "in the mood" as I like to put it.

I remember going to that gym for the first time. A very nice, fit young man showed me the ropes (almost literally!) and gave me loads of advice on what apparatus to start on, ending with the necessity of warming up and cooling down. I bought myself some gear and started off on the treadmill. This was supposed to be the warming up phase but I soon got bored with that and went on to do the exercise for strengthening my back muscles. When I'd finished that- it didn't take long - I didn't feel like doing much else so I hopped back on the treadmill to do the cooling down bit and then I wandered over to the fruit juice bar where tanned and very fit looking people were enjoying colourful drinks and chatting about abs and pectorals and exciting stuff like that. I remember downing my fruit cocktail, if I recall aright it was a mixture of kiwi, mango and some minty stuff, and then strolling back to the changing room, towel draped artistically around my neck, looking - probably - as if I had spent a few hours working out. I kept that up for a number of weeks, happily taking leave of my colleagues with the words "I'm off to the gym". And I did go to the gym. I went in the evening after work, on Saturday afternoons and on Sunday mornings. There was one guy there who was always at the fruit bar and who I never saw doing any actual training. He was tall and slim with blond hair and a white smile in a suntanned face and he seemed to be on first name terms with just about everybody, except perhaps me. He got on my nerves after a while I am ashamed to admit.

I never really did anything athletic and I think the whole thing (I was going to say "exercise") was a complete waste of time and money but I felt I was one of the "in" crowd. Quite frankly, the most exercise I got was having a go on the treadmill and getting annoyed with people who parked their towels on the back-exercise apparatus, chatting to fellow devotees and thus blocking my use of that device. Not that I would have used it for more than 10 minutes.
The most sensible thing I did was to let my membership lapse. My health did not deteriorate in any way, I did not put on weight (I had not lost any, to begin with). The main benefit was to my bank account.
Nowadays, I walk everywhere as I no longer have a car, living in the centre of town with a bus stop just down the road, I don't need one.  And I love to walk on the beach. Which only goes to show that the best gyms in life are free - well, that's my story!

Rural Ireland - not quite The Waltons

I grew up in the heart of the country and attended a country school where one of the big events (at least as far as I was concerned) was the arrival of the library van. I can't remember how often the van came to exchange books and put new ones on the one shelf which was devoted to library books. I remember that I was always waiting eagerly for it to call because I had read just about everything on that shelf.
The school was small and taught from Infants to Primary Leaving, which meant from around four- to twelve year-olds. I was about four when I started, accompanying my older brother and sister into this intriguing world. I loved reading from an early age and the habit has stayed with me.  I also developed a taste for languages. We were taught Gaelic from the moment we started school. At that time we used the Gaelic alphabet letters which were different to the English ones. To this day I lament the fact that this practice was discontinued and nowadays no one really knows how to write those ornate letters. By the way, this knowledge of Gaelic lettering came in very handy when I lived in Germany and had to read old German where some of the letters resembled the Gaelic ones of my childhood.
We lived a simple life on a small farm. One of the highlights was when my mother went to the city and came back with stories of the big world and a supply of Cheddar cheese (which we called "hard" cheese because all we could get locally was highly processed soft stuff). This all made me long to see the big cities.
When I did leave home to go to work in Dublin I felt that I was on the start of a great adventure. I thought Dublin was sophisticated, the place to live. Later I transferred my affection to London and although I have lived longer in Germany, near Frankfurt, than anywhere else, Frankfurt has never created that feeling of home for me. If I could I would divide my time between London and where I live now by the sea in Ireland.
I have to admit that I never pined for "Walton's mountain" when I left home. I was always too busy absorbing new impressions, visiting new places. Like many ex-pats, I don't really belong anywhere. I could be deposited in the middle of Brazil, say, and I would find a niche to call home on however temporary a basis. Perhaps it's a good thing, perhaps it's not. You can be located in the biggest city in the world but where you actually live is really like a village - your local shops, bus stop, familiar streets and shortcuts all form part of your environment. Speaking for myself, I can only say, looking back, that I learned something in every place I lived and I wouldn't want to have missed meeting all the people I did meet in those places.

Writing Crime

I like to read crime novels. I think I have read almost every book that Agatha Christie has ever written. I must admit that I rarely watch the TV series and I have never really enjoyed any of the film adaptations. I like to imagine the characters in my head and seeing someone portray them on screen is like watching someone imitate your friends.
Why was Agatha Christie so popular? I don't think anyone ever has the answer. Poirot was, of course, a very strong character and we all had implicit faith in him and his ability to solve the crime. The same goes for Miss Marple. The novels are dated now and yet they don't lose their appeal. I still occasionally re-read Death on the Nile, which I consider one of her best stories. There is not too much gore even if her liking for the use of poison was a bit creepy.
I love rummaging among the books in charity shops. You never know what you will find there. This is how I came to be currently reading Linwood Barclay's No Time for Goodbye. An engaging book, and well written, it is keeping me interested. I see it got mixed reviews on Amazon and most reviewers had the same opinion as me.
What made me write crime fiction? I really do not know. It started with a visit to Killarney while attending a family wedding. The scenery down there is breathtaking in the true sense of the word. Mountains are mysterious - I know, I grew up on a farm where we looked across the valley at the mountains in the distance. My father used to forecast the weather from them. If they stood out sharply against the skyline, it meant rain and if they were enveloped in a haze, it meant it would be fine.
Although my first love is the sea, I also love the mountains, all mountains. They have been there for countless centuries. So that is where my Sergeant Alan Murray stories began.
Which reminds me, time to get back to my laptop.

The latest Sergeant Alan Murray mystery available now on Kindle

This post is really a plug for my latest novel in the Sergeant Alan Murray series which is now available to order on Amazon Kindle. The print version will be available next week. Here's the link:

A COLD CASE OF MURDER by P.B. Barry



Murray's wife Sheila disappeared on Ardnabrone Mountain many years ago and despite several investigations no trace of her was ever found. When DS Lee Sheridan is assigned to revisit the case, Murray is sceptical. The locals will hardly take a city girl, a stranger, into their confidence, he feels. But just as he has convinced himself that Lee is wasting her time, human remains are discovered on Ardnabrone Mountain. Could this be the lead they have all been looking for?


I really enjoyed writing this story even though, at times, I was stumped every so often. Not writers' block exactly but a "where do I go from here?" feeling.
A lot of readers had asked me what really happened to Murray's wife and I had to confess that I didn't know myself - until I started writing the story.  I hope everyone finds it satisfactory. 
Well, it's out there now and I feel like a mother watching her child trotting off to kindergarten or taking its first unaided steps.  Will it be OK?  Should I have done more? I edit my novels at least ten times if not more and yet once I let them go out into the world, the feeling persists that there was something I could have done better. I think many writers experience this, so I am not alone.
Having said - or written - all that, I must admit that I love writing, love shaping the story and watching the characters in action (they seem to take over when I get into the story and go their own way a lot of the time). It makes up for all the hard slog of writing every day - facing a blank screen when starting a novel, knowing what to write in the next chapter - otherwise why would we do it? It's not as if we all hit pay dirt and are rolling in money. It's who we are, I suppose.
Before I get too philosophical, I had better move on.  For one thing, I need another cup of coffee, for another, I need to take the clothes out of the washing machine and hang them out to dry.

Oh, one more thing. If any of my readers have not read the Sergeant Alan Murray mysteries, the first book in the series DEATH IN A LONELY PLACE is free on Kindle from today until Monday. 

Here's the link:
DEATH IN A LONELY PLACE
Two women are abducted and murdered in the sleepy village of Ballyamber at the foot of Ardnabrone Mountain in Co. Kerry. When Garda Sergeant Alan Murray and his assistant, Jim Flynn start their investigation they uncover the loves, hates and intrigues behind the peaceful village façade.
Helen Brophy is on her way to Ballyamber determined to put the past behind her and start a new life when she encounters a dark figure loading something into the boot of a car at Ardnabrone layby, an incident which will ultimately put her life in danger.
Murray and Flynn are in a race against time to find the killer before he strikes again. Then another woman goes missing.

I hope you like it!  Happy reading everyone!

This Writing Life

Today is stormy here by the sea. The tide is coming in with a strong south-easterly wind to fling the water against the sides of the boats. The river makes gurgling noises as it laps against its banks.  I love this kind of weather. I almost envy the seagulls who float about the sky, drifting on the wind as if they really enjoyed it. We are lucky that we don't have a full moon or a new moon as with the gale force wind coming from the south-east, this would possibly mean flooding in the lower reaches of the town. I didn't stay out too long as I am still recovering from a nasty virus which I picked up over Christmas/New Year.
It was good to get back in the warmth but no excuse for not returning to my writing. I am doing the final edit on my Sergeant Alan Murray series novel A Cold Case of Murder. Here is a preview of the cover:

Murray's wife Sheila disappeared on Ardnabrone Mountain several years ago and despite several investigations no trace of her was ever found. When DS Lee Sheridan is assigned to revisit the case, Murray is sceptical. The locals will hardly take a city girl, a stranger, into their confidence, he feels.
But just as he has convinced himself that Lee is wasting her time, human remains are discovered on Ardnabrone Mountain. Could this be the lead they have all been looking for?

I have edited and re-edited the story countless times. Some famous author once said that writing is re-writing and I am inclined to agree. But it is a labour of love.  I am sitting here in the spare bedroom which I use as my office. Outside my window I can see the river, swelled now by the incoming tide and I can hear the wind whistling through the street. Time to get back to work!

Looking back at Christmas with lots of hindsight

Well, it all seems like ice ages ago now, doesn't it, that whirlwind of activities and "I musn't forgets" that heralds Christmas each year for so many people? How did your festive season go?  As a child growing up in rural Ireland I was often struck by grown-ups asking each other "how did ye get over the Christmas?"  I used to wonder what they meant. Now I begin to see that we have made the Christmas season into a marathon to be run according to the laws of advertising.
Yes, I'm on my little soap box, here. As I was travelling around Christmas time which involved sitting in airport lounges waiting for flights etc.,  I read a lot of magazines and newspapers centred around the festive theme. Almost without exception they gave advice on how not to get too stressed out, on how to cope, on what to buy and what not to buy as Christmas presents, how to cook the turkey.  The lists went on and on. It sounded more like advice for troops going into battle. The joy of a family holiday, of a get-together, seemed to me to have been totally lost. I found myself wondering not for the first time, why we have to go to all this trouble, including in many cases a visit to a church service when we are not church goers - one mother who did this told me her child kept asking when Christmas was going to start and she herself was appalled that the service lasted an hour!
I love cooking although I am not good at traditional dishes. Does it matter? If people want to sit around my table then they should expect a delicious meal (no - not turkey!) which I have cooked without getting a nervous breakdown over it. I should be happy and relaxed to see my guests, knowing I had done all I could to make them welcome and provide them with a nice meal. And I want to see them enjoying themselves and I want to enjoy myself without wondering if the table decorations are up to scratch. Conversation and laughter should be the order of the day. Is more than that required, and if so, why?
A trip to McDonalds or SuperMacs or a good old-fashioned Chinese takeaway and a good chat around the table is surely preferable to all that glitzy complicated stuff I read about in those magazines.
OK, I've got that off my chest.  To all my readers: A VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR!