Well peps, it’s been a mighty long time but today I decided it’s high time I blugged a blog, so here I am.

Where have I been? Well, on holiday, trying to do some of the stuff I promised I’d do after I’d finished looking after Mum and Dad and … stuff.

However, I’ve been trying to use the time I have available to devote to my ‘author career’ to do writing. I think I tend to blog more when there’s nothing coming writing-wise because blogging is fun and keeps my hand in, but if the books are going well I tend to put all my writing energy into producing those. That said, despite the fact the writing is going pretty well this week, I really and truly thought it was high chuffing time I said something.

What’s happening then?

Well I’m preparing to do a stall at the fabulous Forward Festival next Saturday (16th). There is a book fair, I’m not going to that, but I will be at the Young Adult tent in the family friendly market. The whole festival is taking place from yesterday through to Sunday 17th. The thing runs for a whole week although there are no events tomorrow so everyone can recover from the weekend before they start the rest of it! Wise, I feel.

There is have a wide and varied selection of authors doing talks, a record fair and all sorts of events. Sorry this is sounding like a commercial isn’t it? Mwahahargh! Well since I’m doing a stall I guess it is but it’s also because it looks fab. I will definitely aim to go to some of the events as they look interesting. Case in point, the book fair, the vynal fair and probably one of the talks if I can manage it.

Talking of vynal and then obliquely, music. A brilliant thing happened this week. McMini was going to a re-enactment in Market Harborough and so when McOther and I dropped him off we decided to visit the town for the day. We visited the museum, which is free, and in the library, and has some cracking stuff in it including some stupendous finds bequeathed by a local metal detectorist. If he found that lot and got to keep it, heaven knows what wonderful things went through the treasure process and ended up in museums. Anyway, MTM verdict on the museum, small but perfectly formed. MTM verdict on Market Harborough, very pretty, a bit down at heel in places but containing all sorts of interesting shops, including a real cobbler etc.

There was also a decent number of charity shops there too and it was in one of these that McOther spotted an electrical item and, thinking it might be an amplifier, which McMini currently wants to source for his sound system, he went and had a look. I joined him and we discovered that it wasn’t an amp but was actually a CD/DVD player made by a company called Cambridge Audio, bearing the hefty price tag of £10.

Since McMini’s current interest is buying broken walkmans and fixing them, it seemed a good idea to buy it, since, even if it didn’t work, I reckoned we could probably get £20 for it on Ebay if we sold it for spares. And of course, there was every chance that McMini could fix it, or possibly, McMini’s extremely helpful mentor in this endeavour, a bloke up the road called Alan, who fixes extremely high-end stereo for people, and also adds things to make them more compatible with modern tech so their owners can plug them into their computers and similar.

Can we just take a moment, here, to give a big shout out to Alan? He has spent endless time and patience helping McMini fix one of the early Sanyo walkmans—which is admittedly, very cool—and taught him lots about fixing electronics, soldering etc in the process. I owe Alan a LOT of beer for his kindness.

Right on we go. Cambridge Audio are high end. The current CD thing they offer retails at £500. The one in the shop was older, obviously. I discovered, later, that it retailed at £300 in 2004. It was extremely popular as the picure quality was excellent apparently. I’m a big cynical sometimes about CD/DVD players in that they all do the same thing, essentially, so there shouldn’t really be a gap in quality, added to which, my own CD player is not too shabby. I reckoned there shouldn’t be too much difference but when I plugged it in to my stereo system and had a listen I was amazed to discover that there was a definite gap in quality. The Cambridge Audio one had more depth. It was more like listening to headphones than listening out loud. And it works. Woot.

Extra bonus points, I discovered it had a remote and because it was a popular model, there were several available to buy on ebay. I plumped for one that cost £8.99 with £3.99 postage. I have, therefore procured a very good CD player for £23! Hoorah.

Other stuff …

Weirdness continues. I have a polytunnel/greenhouse in the garden. It’s on the path from the gate, so I pass it on my way in every time I’ve been out. Often I pop in there on the way to the back door and just check that everyone has enough water and water the things that need some. Usually I am wearing a small rucksack on my back, which doubles as my handbag, when I do this. Sometimes, if I’m a bit clumsy, I turn the wrong way and knock an unripe fruit off the tomatoes with the bag. This is annoying.

It seems that I dislogdged a tomato this way at some point last week, which fell into the open pocket at the front of my bag. There it stayed until Saturday, when I was in Market Harborough and found it there. By this time, it had ripened, so I was able to have a very small bite of lunch. It was delicious so if this year’s crop all taste like that, we’re onto a winner.

Stuff like this, with the tomato, happens to me regularly.

A tomato, yesterday

Last exciting thing …

… Which, as you’ll have gathered from the previous exciting things, is really not that exciting at all. I decided it might be good to get one of those festival trollies to transport my books around at events. Right now I’m using a sack barrow that has a box integrated into it. It’s excellent but when I start adding the banner, or heaven forefend, a table, it all gets a bit dodgy. If I put the banner on it wrong I also end up getting stuck in every single doorway I go through, as well, which is not helpful.

However, it’s one thing deciding that enough is enough and quite another trying to find a festival trolly which will fit in the boot of a Lotus Elise. Not the early ones which had a nice big boot, this is the diddy one with the souped-up 1.6 toyota yaris engine. There are only about five of them on the road (and I really don’t need ‘howmanyleft dot com’ to tell me this, the availability of spare parts is eloquent enough on its own. I have the ‘last in the uk’ of several bits). It also has the exhaust pipes in the middle and that means there is a giant lump in the boot floor to accommodate the catalytic converter underneath. What that means is it’s not always easy to fit things in. Then you have the added problem that the standard plastic boxes used for storage, which I could, sensibly, use for books, don’t fit in there, or my box sack barrow thing, or on the front seat/in the footwell.

At a book fair a while ago, I was admiring the festival trolley being wielded by my author mate Julia Blake (check out her books by the way, they’re excellent). Julia writes multi-genre so often has a LOT of books to carry. I’ve been toying with the idea of buying a festival trolley but thus far have been put off by the fact that a) I wasn’t sure any of them would fit in my car and b) they seemed to retail for about the same amount as a kidney on the black market. Yes. They were expensive.

However, Julia showed me hers (phnarr phnarr) demonstrating how it folded up, and how the wheels came off so it would fit in a very small space. More importantly, for my running-on-an-elastic-band-and-a-shoestring author business, it retailed at a price I could afford. I was impressed enough that we decided to see if we could jemmy it into the boot of my car once folded. Lo! And behold! It fitted. Yeh. Blimey. So Julia kindly sent me a link to buy one for myself.

I decided I’d buy one at once!

Spool forward a few months—because as we know, I am always incredibly swift to put any of my plans into action (not) and ‘right away’ in Mary world can be anything from ‘within the next five minutes’ to ‘sometime before I die of old age … probably’—I finally got round to it. I discovered that the makers of Julia’s original trolley had superceded it with new version, with wider wheels. It also had a wheel at each corner, whereas the original had the front wheels a little closer togther, in the middle. This had me worried —probably needlessly—about stability.

The only fly in the ointment still was the car. The car is non-negotiable. If I have to drive sodding miles I want to do it in a vehicle that is fun and diverting enough to drive to keep my attention. Otherwise my mind will wander and I will die. Would the new trolley fit? Well I read the measurements and it appeared to fold up slightly smaller than its predecessor. I knew that fitted so I reckoned I’d stick my neck out and buy it.

I bought one that promised to arrive next week. It arrived two day’s later. Which was nice, but a bit of a surprise, especially as I wasn’t in. We found it on the doorstep when we got home. The box was tiny box. See picture.

The tiny, tiny, box

Seriously, my cat couldn’t fit into this thing. See picture.

My enormous cat

OK so my cat is huge see picture, note loo roll for scale, but even so, you get the idea. What I’m saying is it’s a small box. When I say small, bearing in mind that the boxes I use for books are all small but I have put them in the passenger seat beside me because only one will fit in the boot, this box would fit in the boot. AND, there’d be room to shoehorn in another box … possibly. That’s how infinitesimally small it was.

Have I said enough about how small the box is? Hmm, yes, I think I probably have. Onward.

It was quite difficult to get the trolly out of the box, but once I had, I discovered that it folded up a ridiculously small size. We are talking small enough to fit in one of those re-usable bags you can get from Savers. Yeh. Miniscule.

I haven’t used it yet. I’ve no idea if it travels over rough terrain and sand the way the sales pitch promises, or whether, like rollerblades, it stops dead when it hits a slightly raised paving slab (or stone) although at least it won’t pitch me forward onto my face the way rollerblades do in this situation. So there’s that.

The trolley will be having its first outing next week as I suspect it will be a long walk from the car to the venue for the Forward Festival.

Where you come in

I need a name for this trolley. OK bear with me, if you reckon you have my train of thought here and feel like jumping ahead, you’re probably right. But please, please, please, read this bit first..

Just for larks, I decided to set up a poll to allow my fans to pick a suitably K’Barthan name for the trolley. So far, almost both my fans have kindly joined in with the name poll—hoorah—and we have a clear leader.

Foolishly I gave voters the option to go off piste and suggest a name of their own, so long as they chose a K’Barthan related name from the books. About 20% of the respondents chose to choose and of those, a massive none of them kept it K’Barthan, mwahahahrgh!

This proves, beyond all doubt, no fucker will ever read the fecking question if they can possibly avoid it.

Likewise, if you give people more than one piece of information at a time and they will take absolutely NO fucking notice of the second piece. Indeed, if you are foolish enough to warn them NOT to do something, they will go out of their way to do that exact thing.

Perhaps this explains why, when you contact a support site for help and ask two questions—because they take 48 hours to respond and you haven’t got all day—they will only answer the first question you ask, forcing you to re-ask the second question and wait another 48 hours because asking more then one thing fries their heads.

Having said all that, the poll is still open, so if you want to help me choose a name for the Trolley it would be wonderful. All you have to do is follow this somewhat unwieldy link. Oh and if you do decide to suggest your own name, please keep it to a character name from my books. Ta.

Name the trolley

The trolley to be named …

Writing.

The latest K’Barthan thing is so nearly finished it hurts, although I may write quite a lot of the next one before I publish it. This being the plan, I do need to get my finger out of my arse pronto as I have an editing slot provisionally booked for September/October. Shit! That’s only a month away. Fuck!

Sorry where was I? Oh yes, the K’Barthan thing. I really don’t have much to write before it’s finished. It will need polishing though. Hmm.

The memoir. I’m reading a lot of other memoirs at the moment to see which ones I enjoy and respond to and which ones not so much. So far, all I’ve really discovered is that I like things that feel genuine. I like the characterisation to be good, even if it’s someone describing their loved ones or people they know. I also enjoy depth, although it’s surprising the memoires where this depth occurrs.

I’ve just finished Father Joe by Stephen Hendra. As a description of one person’s profound effect on another, it’s fabulous. Also I love the way he writes (bitchy but honest). He was clearly an absolute dick for a big part of his life, but his memoir is so honest and up front, and coupled with the irreverent style of his writing you can’t help liking him. I feel that I am closer to getting a handle on the kind of memoir I want to attempt but it’s still hard to look it in the face. I’m definitely getting a feel for how I want to write it though. The up-front honest style is definitely the way to go.

So there we are, I’ll leave you with a quick bit of info about the Forward Festival.

The Foreword Festival (9th August – 17th August, 2025)

The Foreword Festival, which I hope I have spelled correctly in this post—bloody auto-correct will keep changing it—is the first independent book festival in the UK. It is running in Stowmarket and it’s running … NOW.

The festival is taking place in Stowmarket, in Suffolk. There is a  LOT going on suffice it to say they’ve thought of absolutely everything. Yes, it even has its own beer! How cool is that?

Foreword Festival beer!

If you are in striking distance of Stowmarket and fancy giving the festival a whirl, I can highly recommend it. Clearly the organisers have taste because they let me join in but seriously, it’s going to be fun. For comprehensive information as to what’s on when, go here:/https://forewordfestival.uk/