Flaming Nora: Community spirit, stotty cake, ribbons and tears

Saturday, February 06, 2021

Community spirit, stotty cake, ribbons and tears - my writing week

Some great news this week! I've heard from my publisher that the paperback release of THE PAPER MILL GIRL has been brought forward to Thurs Mar 11 at Amazon and Waterstones online. This means you can order it in time for Mother's Day on Sun Mar 14!

Order now for delivery by Mother's Day at bitly.com/PaperMillGirl

Ryhope is the village where I was born and bred and it's where my novels are set. This week I donated 40 copies of The Girl with the Scarlet Ribbon to Ryhope Community Centre to distribute with afternoon teas to the elderly and those isolating at home. If you can, you should, and it's more important than ever right now to help where you can, so I did.

The Girl with the Scarlet Ribbon was the Roker Life's new book club first book of choice, what an honour! I was invited to join the book club on a zoom Q&A and it was a wonderful experience. It was amazing to see people's faces without masks, to interact, to chat and gossip and have fun. It was an absolutely wonderful experience. Not only that, but every member of the book club wore a scarlet ribbon in their hair which just about made me cry! And the book inspired to make their own stotty cake too.

Another mention, this time of The Miner's Lass in The Bookseller's list of new fiction to be released in May. And, I think, my favourite of all my book covers so far.

Two of my novels - The Paper Mill Girl and The Miner's Lass were featured in the Buyer's Guide to Fiction delivered with my copy of The Bookseller this week. Read more on that here.

I was given a mention in New Writing North's newsletter in a segment about writing events at The Word, the national centre for the written word, in South Shields. I'll be having my book launch online with The Word on Thursday March 18th. It's free and you're invited. Find out more here.

Also this week I recorded two short videos chatting about my upcoming new book The Paper Mill Girl. Both videos will be posted on my blog and social media in the coming weeks, I can't release them yet as they were both commissioned, one for a woman's magazine and another for a library. More on all of that very soon!

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.

And finally, I 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.