We’re working on cover art for None So Blind at the moment. It’s pretty nerve-wracking because, though we all know books shouldn’t be judged by their covers, we know with equal certainty that they always are. When Panmac published Testament, I had no input into the cover art at all. It’s a completely different story […]

Driving back from the Penfro Book Festival yesterday, I started thinking about the people who go to literary festivals. Readers and writers, it seems to me, go to literary festivals for very different reasons. Readers have an uncomplicated time of it – they’re there to listen to and chat with writers they like or writers […]

As those of you who follow me on Facebook at Alis Hawkins Author will know, I’m currently going through the proofs of In Two Minds, the second in the Teifi Valley Coroner series. This is a new experience for me as Macmillan New Writing, the imprint under which Testament was published, didn’t run to proofreaders […]

Like most of the writers I know, I find the opening scene of a book the most difficult to write. Where exactly is the right moment to begin the story? Whose point of view should it be from? How much should you reveal to hook people in and how much should you hold back to […]

I do a lot of writing, quite apart from writing novels. Always have. I’ve written and continue to write reports and programmes and letters and summaries and recommendations and charts and social stories and things I’ve forgotten for the day job. I’ve written sketches for youth groups and articles for local papers and full-scale plays […]

I’m sorry but I’ve got to talk about the football. You know – the European Championships? The ones Wales played in the semi-final of? Ok, so I know we lost, but to have got to the semi finals at all was a major, major deal. The hashtag on Twitter was ‘Together Stronger’ and the extraordinary […]

  Don’t worry, I’m not going to talk about the referendum here. This isn’t the place. You can stalk me on Twitter if you want to see my views on that. But I did happen to come across an article the other day that looked at why different generations might have voted in different ways […]

As I’m an English graduate from a university with a certain – shall we say – profile, people expect me to gravitate towards the prize-winning end of the spectrum in my choice of fiction. Not an unreasonable expectation, I suppose; but, as it happens, wide of the mark. Of course, I smile gratefully when the […]

I’m editing None So Blind at the moment. It’s a final edit before the positively last and really final edit which is the copy-edit – ie the edit you do when the whole thing’s typeset and you’re trying to spot typos, line breaks where there didn’t ought to be line breaks, stray punctuation and other […]

I read an interesting piece at online resource Publishing Perspectives today by Alastair Horne about the popularity of crime fiction in Britain. One sentence, quoted from academic Alison Baverstock, particularly jumped out at me: When crime fiction is … strongly associated with a particular place, it tends to build a following amongst people who themselves […]