Do you listen to music while you work?

Evening kids,

How's things? You will have noticed my blogging activity has increased. Benefits of being off work right there.

Anyway, I've spent a very productive evening listening to The Man Who by Travis and currently I'm halfway through Odds and Sods by The Who. The dog - Ralph - is asleep next to me on the couch and I've got the first 105 pages of the new novel in much better shape.

I do find that I focus better when I have music on. It has to be at quite a low volume, background almost, and then I sort of know it's there but I can concentrate on what I'm doing in a way that I struggle to do when the room is completely silent.

Quick update on the new novel then. I've tweaked a couple of characters, their relationship to each other actually, so that key scenes make a lot more sense now. The aim of this draft - the second - is just to make sure the plot holds together and to spot any glaring errors. Then I'll do a third draft where I pretty it all up, sort the formatting, grammar, lob some colour on it all I suppose.

But I'm pretty happy with it so far. However I've been known to do some pretty major rewrites at this stage before so we shall see. In a fun twist, the novel is set in and around Morecambe, specifically the Winter Gardens. Guess where the wife is tonight? Yep, Winter Gardens watching a colleague and a friend in a performance of Beauty and the Beast. I was going to go but then we got Ralph. I have to admit I'm pretty happy to be here rather than there.

Anyway, that's it for now. As ever my late evening plans are to watch more Breaking Bad on Netflix and drink ale.

Making the most of Morecambe

Evening folks,

Just a quickie tonight. The wife's out so I'm going to indulge in some big screen film/xbox tom-foolery. But I will be recording Turn Back Time on BBC 1 as it's set in Morecambe and features several places featured in my books.

Speaking of which, I have recently acquired the Winter Gardens in Morecambe as a follower on Twitter. If you've got a spare million or ten, send them a donation. If they crack on and get it refurbished they could have The Rolling Stones do their 50th anniversary gigs there next year. Now wouldn't that be something to aim for!

Dreaming aside, here's a bit of Morecambe based book promo. You'll like this, it's clever.

The photo above is the entrance to Happy Mount Park in Morecambe. Alfie, the central character in my book, All the fun of the Fair, is park keeper here. Also, the vile Lee Etchman runs the cafe and has an ice cream van in there too. He is obsessed with his young assistant Tania Streatham.

The park also features in my book The 24 Hour Jazz Cafe. The body of a schoolgirl is found at the back of the park by a dog walker.

So you see, while the work is fiction, the places featured in the books are quite real. You could even come to visit, perhaps use my books as a kind of guide to places of interest.