Yesterday, I finished line-editing the third in the Teifi Valley Coroner series – Those Who Can. (We’ll come back to the title in a later post, I’m sure.) Editing’s a funny business. Some writers rely very heavily on input from their editors and there is a lot of sending suggestions and redrafts backwards and forwards […]

The second in the series of features on other people’s blogs inspired by #IndyBookTourCymru2019 is a guest post on the lovely Tomes With Tea where I’m talking about my desert island books. Spoiler alert – only one of the three is a novel. But you can find out what I consider to be the most […]

Over the next few weeks, there will be a few features coming up, here on the blog, that have been sparked by encounters with bloggers on #IndyBookTourCymru2019. First up is my appearance in Cwtch Corner, book blogger Bookertalk’s regular feature on Welsh writers. So, if you want to know: i) how I’d sum up In […]

I think it’s in Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt that a character notices how constant travel seems to make time pass more slowly and so makes your life seem longer. Whether I’ve attributed it to the right book or not (no doubt somebody will tell me) the observation is certainly true for the last […]

St David’s – or St Davids, take your pick – may or may not be the smallest city in Britain. (You can see the debate here if you’re interested.) And St Davids Bookshop may or may not be the smallest bookshop in Britain (a 2011 Guardian supplement on indie bookshops certainly suggested that it might […]

Narberth is a pretty little town in the southern, mostly English-speaking part of Pembrokeshire. Founded around a Welsh court and later a Norman stronghold, it is now a shopping destination and tourist centre, and Narberth Museum – housed since 2012 in the Bonded Stores – is key to the tourist offering. The Bonded Stores, the […]

Haverfordwest, where the Victoria Bookshop played host to #IndyBookTourCymru2019 on day 28, has a unique place in my family’s life. Though it was an hour’s drive from home, for a period of about three months when I was 8 and my brother 7, my parents drove us to Haverfordwest every Sunday morning after milking so […]

Yesterday took me to the lovely seaside town of Mumbles. (Those of you who, like me, are interested in etymology can find some intriguing information about the name here.) The town was basking in the sunshine when I got there and the wide bay looked gorgeous with long-bladed wind turbines and Swansea’s high-rise buildings gleaming […]

Yesterday, #IndyBookTourCymru2019, day 25, was on home turf at Awen Teifi in Cardigan – a lovely, welcoming shop on Cardigan’s high street, only a stone’s throw from The Black Lion, the coaching inn which features fairly prominently in In Two Minds. Awen Teifi is a handsome, double-fronted shop which, if the posters in the front […]

It wasn’t my intention to write blog posts about bookshops that I just visited to say hi for social media purposes but I had such lovely welcomes at both Nickleby’s in Llantwit Major and Cowbridge Bookshop, yesterday, that I just wanted to mention them here. Both Llantwit Major and Cowbridge are small enough not to […]