If you’ve read my Author Bio, or my About page, you’ll know that I grew up in Coventry, England. My family have deep ties to the City and most of them still live there, so I visit often. When I returned to the UK in 2012, I spent my first six months back in the country living there again, only moving away due to my husband’s work. It’s a place that holds a lot of happy memories for me.

Coventry is also the real-world setting for my Ambeth books. Alma lives on my old street, and the Gate of Oak is in the Memorial Park, a place that has always held magic for me. It is telling that, when I sat down to write my first book, Coventry was the inspiration and starting point. It is a city I still hold close to my heart.

So, when Coventry was named…

My lovely author-and bloggy-friend Sacha recently released her excellent writing craft book, 13 Steps To Evil – How To Craft A Superbad Villain, which I would recommend as essential to any writer. Today, she’s released the accompanying workbook. Here, in her own words, she tells us what we’ll find inside:

How do you become the best writer you can?

Is a question I constantly ask myself in my quest to write full-time.

One of the most obvious answers I’ve discovered is by continuing to learn lessons and develop your craft.

But lessons only take you so far, right?

Why?

Because you have to put them into practice.

***

At the tail end of May, I released 13 Steps To Evil – How To Craft A Superbad Villain which was jam-packed with resources and tips to improve your villains and help you take them to the next level.

But what…

Even though I’ve been blogging for three years now, I’m still finding my way around some of the other social media platforms. There are so many it can be difficult to find time to work across all of them, especially if you want to, you know, actually get some writing done.

One platform I’d been hearing a lot about, especially from other bloggers, was Pinterest. I’d heard of it years ago, via a designer friend, but hadn’t ever bothered to look into it. It wasn’t until my soon to be sister-in–law was pinning wedding ideas and invited me to take a look, that I decided to set up an account.

Once set up I pinned a few blog posts, set up a couple of boards, followed some people and left it at that. I didn’t really get any blog views from the site, and I just didn’t have any time…

[courtesy of TWN]

I had the distinct honor and pleasure recently to interview Weather Presenter Chris Murphy from Canada’s, “The Weather Network” (TWN). Without further ado, let’s dive in and see what he had to say in response to the plethora of questions I asked him!

I wanted to find out if he began his passion for ‘all things weather’ from childhood, so I asked him this question:  What was your favorite toy as a child?

Star Wars figures – Hans Solo, Chewbacca, Darth Vader just to name a few.  (He couldn’t get enough of them!)

I was trying to tie in his love for the Star Wars sensation with his love of the weather……you know, stars, sky, that sort of thing. 

He could tell where I was going with my silly inquiry and said, “Sky Wars with Mother Nature…. some days it’s sunny and other days it’s thunder and lightning.”  

In all…

This was a list of physical, psychological, financial and emotional things that I created a couple of months ago to make life that little bit easier… and it really works. Of course, it’s impossible to do all of these in a day, but I have broken it down into smaller chunks – I’ve found that incorporating things into a daily routine, while occasionally adding in a few extra tasks makes day-to-day life easier and good for the soul.

1. Find a mantra. I have one that I refer to regularly during difficult times: Create a life that you don’t need to take a vacation from. This is what drives me in almost everything that I do.

2. Learn the power of no, and recognise what you do and don’t owe others.

3. Declutter. Be ruthless. Anything that you haven’t read, worn or listened to in a year serves no…