Happy New Year, Everyone! Here’s hoping we all have a peaceful and prosperous 2014. I can hardly believe we have reached 2014, for it seems like yesterday that everyone was worrying about the so-called ‘millennium bug’. What a waste of effort that was!

My entire backlist is now available on Kindle!

Details below, including the original blurbs and links to Amazon UK and Amazon US. They are also available in all other Amazon Kindle stores. I’ll shortly also be publishing them in other ebook formats.

A rather fruity month! I’ve been interested for a long time in slightly unusual fruits and vegetables. Take damsons. They aren’t really unusual, but it’s very difficult to buy them in the shops. My two great-aunts, retired teachers, had a huge damson tree in their garden and every year my Auntie Elsie used to make damson jam, right on into her mid nineties. I developed a love of damsons, and have finally been able to plant a couple of damson trees, so I can now harvest my own damsons, remembering her.

When the Virginia Creeper turns this colour, there’s no more hiding from the truth – autumn is here. Then when the clocks go back to Greenwich Mean Time and the evenings become darker and darker, the winter woollies come out. It has been such a beautiful summer that it’s hard to let go, but October has its compensations. For one thing, it’s my birthday month. Here are some birthday flowers, still going strong after three weeks – it’s very cold in our drawing room!

September is harvest month and allows little time for anything else. We generally spend most of the month at our house in Herefordshire, inherited from David’s parents. They built this when they retired, in a pretty village near the Welsh border (handy for the bookshops in Hay-on-Wye). When David and his brother inherited it, his brother wasn’t interested in keeping the house, but we were, urged on by our children, who had been spending holidays there for years, so we bought out David’s brother’s share and have continued to enjoy our Herefordshire links and friends ever since.

To picture my activities this month, you must imagine a woman hunched over a laptop, fingers tapping away, never looking up except for an occasional vague stare while a hand gropes for a few more yoghurt-covered raisins.

This has not been a very newsy month, so there’s not much to write about my activities. Almost the entire month has been taken up with editing and revising my new novel, set in the Fen country in the mid seventeenth century and provisionally titled Flood.

This month has been almost entirely given over to completing the first draft of my seventeenth-century novel, provisionally titled Flood, but there have been a few other diversions. Early in the month we went to a party with friends who live at Pitkerro House:

Still on the hunt for spring, I found these late-arriving bluebells:

Some valiant pansies:

The first of our apple trees in Scotland just coming into bloom:

The Pieris with its pink early leaves: