Flaming Nora: Done and dusted, spring cleaning my mind

Friday, March 03, 2023

Done and dusted, spring cleaning my mind - my writing week

This week I finished the first draft of The Toffee Factory Girls. This is the first book in the trilogy. There's still a long way to go, with editing and proofreading, before it goes to my publisher later this year. And the story doesn't end there. There'll be more editing to do, more proofreading, until it's as polished as can be and ready for readers in the shops in 2024.

And here I am ready to start editing!

Two days this week I rented an office in the wonderful River Wear Comissioners' Building in Sunderland. I get SO much work done with no distractions. It's an historic building and very insping to work in.

Here are more pictures from last week's visit to Bedlington Library in Northumberland. It was such a joyous day with a wonderful audience. You can tell by the sheer joy on my face!

And here I am with award-winning librarian Michelle in the striped top, and Julie who very kindly picked me up from the railway station and drove me to the library and back.

If you'd be interested in coming along to events, book talks, author talks, book fairs and signings, check out my website here where all of my events are listed.

My new novel The Sixpenny Orphan was featured in The Bookseller magazine in their preview of paperbacks coming in May. I was overjoyed to see it there!

I'm doing a fundraising talk for Frogmore Paper Mill, the world's first mechanised paper mill, which has been devastated by fire. They helped me SO MUCH with research for my novel The Paper Mill Girl. I spent two days there with their paper mill archivist. My talk will be all about the amazing research I did for The Paper Mill Girl and the work of women in the papermills circa WW1.

See the blog post I wrote about my visit to Frogmore during the research for The Paper Mill Girl.

The Paper Mill Girl is my bestselling novel so far. It was the book that propelled me into the bestselling top 50 chart... at number 49, for one week... but I'll take that happily!

The talk includes a meal. ALL profits on books sold on the night will go to the rebuilding fund. I'll be happy to sign books too.

Date for your diary, Friday 10 November 2023 at 7pm.

All details at https://www.frogmorepapermill.org.uk/event/talks-programme/

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.