Nicky Bond's Blog

Hey You! Looking good! Isn't it a lovely day! 
If you detect a glimmer of jollity to my words, or a hint of the frivolous more evident than usual, you'd not be mistaken. It's finally here! Leeza McAuliffe is Branching Out is IN THE WORLD. Look at the links below... ALL the choices. (Other global Amazon sites also have it.)
UK (Amazon)UK (Waterstones)UK (Foyles)UK Kindle US AmazonUS Barnes and Noble Ordinarily, there'd be months of a book being available to pre-order before the publication date. It...

In Nick Hornby's book, About a Boy , Will - a grown man with no job - lives off the royalties of his dead dad's one hit wonder. 
He considers himself an island with no need for connection, and has devised a handy system to fill his excessive free time.

'His way of coping with the days was to think of activities as units of time, each unit consisting of about thirty minutes. Whole hours, he found, were more intimidating, and most things one could do in a day took half an hour. Reading the paper, hav...

This should be my 2026 Eurovision post.
It's that time of year when I remind you that the contest is on Saturday, with the semis taking place on Tuesday and Thursday of this week. I'd be recapping on how much I love Eurovision season, whether or not I rate the UK's chances, and which of the other competing songs stand out as likely winners. That's what normally happens. Not this year.
This year, I've been hugely disengaged. I know there's two semis and a final this week but that's about it. I've l...

Suddenly, and with no warning whatsoever, the annual Bond Family Welsh Caravan Weekend of Nonsense arrived. Catchy? No! Fun? Yeaaaah!
Was it good timing or not? On the one hand, my recent weeks of techy headaches left me DESPERATE for a seaside escape. Alternatively, now that a corner's been turned in the current publishing journey, and my hair-tearing and silent screams have abated, I really wanted to crack on with work. 
But here we are! The Bond Family Welsh Caravan Weekend of Nonsense stopped ...

Cast your mind back to the pandemic. Don't worry, this'll be brief. 
Not quite a field, but almost the same.Like many people whose lives were on hold, I found myself hoovering up hours of podcasts as I went about my daily walk. I can remember exactly where I was (the track through the fields by the back of my house) when I heard Charlie Brooker say the following words... 

‘The core assumption I made that was wrong was that I would watch things on TV and would assume that the people making them wer...

Hello there. Welcome to another week of 'Will my emails to the indie-publisher's help desk result in a satisfactory resolution to all my issues, or not?' 
Isn't it a ball-ache? Making a book? Life in general? You decide. For example, this is the second blog post I wrote for today. The first was much more triumphalist in tone. I thought I'd cracked it. I thought the book had been accepted and ready for pre-order. But then I checked the draft they'd emailed me, and it wasn't. The front cover looked...

Oh chocolate, you have broken me.
The Mini Egg bowl - one
week later.If all the Mini Eggs in the world could just quietly fade into the background and remove themselves from my sight, that would be helpful. I just can't stop popping them into my mouth. Like grapes or Smints, just with a hard sickly shell, it's becoming a real problem. Meanwhile, what with the past week being decidedly non-standard (school holidays, family visits, and a sad-but-lovely friends' gathering) I've not had a balanced mea...

What was YOUR year when everything came together?

Waiting for my 
personality to gel

Do you get what I mean? A year when, without planning it to be so, the disparate aspects of your personality melded together and you emerged into the light like the fledgeling human being you continue to be today? Sorry. It's probably too early for such an existential question. I apologise. I'm not trying to mentally tax you on a Bank Holiday Monday. It's just been on my mind recently. Since January, actually.

Me in...

It's full steam ahead. Choo Choo! (or something)
Not to pre-empt the Writing News section below, but it's fair to say that the last two years of quietly constant creation are about to reach fruition. What does that mean? It means I know what my book will look like, and when and where it'll be available. Hurrah!
Obviously, until I've received the final proof and checked every little thing, I'll be keeping my counsel on the details. Just be assured that the past couple of weeks have seen me all of a...

Happy birthday eve to me! 
Yes, you find me busily preparing for my special day, hell bent on twenty-four hours of raucous hedonism. And what shape will that raucous hedonism take? Well, I'm going to have a bath, go out for lunch, and then drink a couple of gentle afternoon pints. I know! The debauchery!
The real gay abandon will be happening tomorrow evening. I'll be back home in my Pjs - natch - but I've got a once-in-a-year tea planned. My brother's flat mate put me on to it. Ready? You get a p...