I have decided to share a few of the chapters I have been working on for my talk/writing on the travel diaries from 1898 - 1910. This is work in progress but will form a part of a larger work looking at the holidays of the Clarke girls. In light of the current sweltering heatwave covering England and Europe, I thought that this would be an appropriate first chapter to share! Research is tricky regarding the bathing, or should I say, swimming habits of the middle-class famil

As mentioned in my last blog post, the majority of the family archives consists of diaries, letters, photographs and ephemera written and collected by three women, sisters Edith (E.R), Anne (Queenie) and Winifred (Winnie or Winks). Smart, driven, active women, these sisters documented their lives and carefully kept the records and this has provided me with a wealth of inspiration. The main challenge is working out where to start and I have decided to start at the beginnin

It was about 15 years ago when I became the archivist for my husband's family archives. I don't know that they had ever thought of this collection as archives, it was just regarded as stuff that hadn't been thrown away and that might have some interest but no one was prepared to properly deal with it. The archives are a collection of letters, papers, diaries and other ephemera that stretch across about 150 years. The earliest document I have found is a sort of obituary for

The first book I wrote, A Bare Chronicle of Existence - Stories and letters from internment in Norway during WW1, allowed me the opportunity to make connections with many different people. I was fortunate to create links to around 40 descendants of men who were on the boat - mostly men who had survived and were interned but a few people contacted me about men who had perished when the HMS India was torpedoed, The stories of from these families complimented the central story

It is probably every writers dream to see their work on the big screen (or even on the small screen). It is certainly one of my dreams...

Getting known on the speaking circuit The plight of HMS India is a little told story and when I published A Bare Chronicle of Existence -...

Trying to find a publisher for Pearced is proving challenging and it is very difficult not to question the quality of your writing when...

One thing that I struggle with is promoting my own work. I am at the stage where I am looking for a publisher for Pearced, my second...

I have been having troubles with my current writing project. Whilst I have undertaken quite a lot of research already, I couldn’t quite...

I am settling in to the reality of being a published writer. It's exciting, yes, but it is also not the end of the road. In fact, it's...