Flaming Nora: 5 more novels, tabloids, Corrie & BBC

Saturday, December 12, 2020

5 more novels, tabloids, Corrie & BBC - My writing week

What a crazy, wonderful week it has been.

Finally, the big news I've been sitting on for months was made public. I'm going to write two more sagas for Headline, bringing the total of sagas set in the northeast mining community where I was born and bred, to eight. Plus I'm going to write three cosy crimes too. The first of these, Murder at the Seaview Hotel, will be published in August 2021.

And as if that wasn't exciting enough to knock my socks off this week, I was featured in a full-page spread in the Mirror. Read more on that here.

My novel The Girl with the Scarlet Ribbon is featured by Trip Fiction who have a competition with three copies of the book to give away. You have until December 19 to enter. Read more on that here.

And my novel The Paper Mill Girl, which comes out in paperback in March 2021, is highlighted in publisher Headline's catalogue for spring 2021. Read more on that here.

My novels were featured in The Sunderland Echo's festive list of gifts to buy from Sunderland creatives. Read more on that here.

Also, this week was Coronation Street's 60th anniversary and I was invited on to the radio three times this week to celebrate the soap milestone, speaking to BBC Scotland, BBC Manchester and BBC Newcastle.

As part of Corrie's 60th anniversary, I received a wonderful email from the daughter of Harry Elton, who was the man responsible for commissioning Coronation Street before it began in 1960. When I told his daughter how Corrie had changed my life, she said her dad would have been very proud. I may have shed tears at this point. Vicky Elton wrote a piece for the Coronation Street Blog which I manage and edit.

In terms of actual sitting down on my backside and writing, I crafted another episode of my weekly soap opera Riverside for The People's Friend magazine. I've been writing Riverside weekly since 2016 and you can find out all about it here.

I also wrote another Coronation Street weekly update and sent it to my emailing list of thousands of Corrie fans around the world. I've been running this list since 1995 and if you'd like to sign up to receive these weekly updates, all details are here.

And last but by no means least is that I've been working daily on the new work in progress. This is a saga novel, for Headline, and a very special one indeed. I can't say anything about it just yet, so watch this space for more. It has the most wayward of all my heroines so far, and she's rocking the boat with my carefully plotted and planned novel. She's doing things I never imagined, or planned and I think the novel will be better for it in the end. Just like my heroine, who's called Emma, I'm rolling with the punches on this one to see where it may go.