Happy New Year

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I have ambivalent feelings about the great New Year hype. I think resolutions only work if there is a meaning to them and if you want them to. I hope 2015 is good for you - and if it starts off wrong, then pick a new date of your own choosing.

take heart...

Happy New <insert date here>
by Jan Jones

New Year’s Day is simply
a day, special only
by an accident
of timing

Unless you hold to the theory
that many vibes shake the ether
Everybody’s wishes coalescing
into a universal
strong new beginning

Your new year
your own new year
nobody else’s new year
starts when you decide
things will be different

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Remembrance

The Tower of London ceramic poppies are now finished. The moat is steeped in red. This is what it looked like on the first day, back in August.

Silent Testimony   by Jan Jones

Poppies pour quietly from an open window
Each a broken body on a broken field far from home
In a while, the Last Post will sound
But for now this is beautiful, and tragic.
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QL SuperBASIC - The Definitive Handbook

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Something over thirty years ago, I was head-hunted by my erstwhile colleague Tony Tebby to join him at Sinclair Research Ltd to work on a new project.

The project was the Sinclair QL, a new affordable micro computer using the superfast Motorola 68008 chip. A team was already in place, but someone was needed to work with Tony on designing and building a new programming language for the QL.

That person was me, and the language we designed was SuperBASIC.

The handbook I wrote once the project was finished was published by McGraw-Hill. It has been out of print for very many years and the rights reverted back to me for nearly as long.

But...

But people are still using their Sinclair QLs. The remaining copies of the original edition of my SuperBASIC book appear for sale at fabulous sums (I do wish I'd kept some of my author copies instead of scattering them around family and friends).

So, more as a labour of love, really, and a desire that if something with my name on is going to appear on the internet, then I'd like it to be the best thing with my name on that I can manage at this time, I bring you the new, Kindle edition of...


QL SuperBASIC - The Definitive Handbook

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Mildy Disturbing...

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On a day when the 31st October hit an astonishing 20 degrees Centigrade here in East Anglia, I bring you this poem...

A Light Fright Night by Jan Jones

It was a balmy All Hallows Eve
When the spirits began to appear
Peering warily round in the sunshine
As if they shouldn’t be here.

The ghost looked askance at her shift
All grey and tattery lace
“I don’t feel decent,” she muttered
And soaped herself in the mill race.

The skeleton scrubbed at his mildew
The zombies sunbathed and crumbled
The golems warmed up nicely
“Why go out?” the witches grumbled.

Ghouls floated like bunting
Across the pub garden
Banshees swigged cider
And lazily gargled. (*gargoyled?*)

The spectre inspector
Gave up in despair
As the vampires took afternoon tea
In their lair.

And the tricks were all treats
And the treaters serene
That unreasonable
Unseasonable
Warm Hallowe’en.
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The Christmas Gift - Penny Plain 4

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The fourth in the Penny Plain Mysteries series is now out from Accent Press!

The Christmas Gift starts off innocuously enough with the idea of tracing forgotten photos in the local newspaper files but, as ever with Penny and Leo, it doesn't stay that simple.

There are petty thefts, Christmas nativities, and before they know it Leo is cycling through thick snow on a borrowed bike with a shepherd's crook across the handlebars.

Oh, and about that kiss at the end of Local Secrets ..?

Sorry - you need to buy the book.

Happy Christmas!

Cover for Penny Plain #4

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To distract me from a nasty sore throat, I received an email this morning with my cover for the fourth in the Penny Plain Mysteries.

The Christmas Gift will be out in November from Accent Press. I will post more about it then.
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More tea, vicar?

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Join me for a Traditional Afternoon Tea at this year's Festival of Romantic Fiction. The event takes place in top tea shop The Green House, Market Square, Leighton Buzzard.

Also pouring tea, buttering scones, slicing cake and chatting about their books will be Christina Courtenay, Talli Roland, Sue Moorcroft, Jean Fullerton, Terri Nixon and Laura Purcell.

It's going to be a great afternoon. Tickets available online here.

Oh, and as a little extra to celebrate FAIRLIGHTS being shortlisted for a Reader Award,  there will be biscuits from Botham's of Whitby for everyone attending. Just stop me and ask...

See you there!

FAIRLIGHTS Shortlisted!

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I am delighted to announce that FAIRLIGHTS has been shortlisted for Best Author-Published book in the Festival of Romantic Fiction Reader Awards!

Lost of my writing pals are also deservedly scattered around the lists, so good luck to all.

The winners will be announced on Saturday Sept 13th at a gala evening do at Leighton Buzzard Theatre, complete with sparkles, heels, canapes and wine.

The full list of shortlistees is...

Best Romantic Read (sponsored by Headline Eternal)

Two Weddings and a Baby by Scarlett Bailey (Ebury)
The Memory Book by Rowan Coleman (Ebury)
The Cornish Stranger by Liz Fenwick (Orion)
After The Honeymoon by Janey Fraser (Arrow)
The Unpredictable Consequences of Love by Jill Mansell (Headline Review)
One Hundred Proposals by Holly Martin (Carina)
The Wedding Proposal by Sue Moorcroft (Choc Lit)
The Proposal by Tasmina Perry (Headline Review)
One Step Closer to You by Alice Peterson (Quercus)


Best Historical Read

The Downstairs Maid by Rosie Clarke (Ebury)
Monsoon Mists by Christina Courtenay (Choc Lit)
The Maid of Milan by Beverley Eikili (Choc Lit)
The Dress Thief by Natalie Meg Evans (Quercus)
Crosscurrents by Jane Jackson (Accent Press)
Home For Christmas by Lizzie Lane (Ebury)
A Rose in Flanders Fields by Terri Nixon (Carina)
Queen of Bedlam by Laura Purcell (Myrmidon)


Best Short Romance

Don't Tell Penny by Anna Bell (Quercus)
Taming Her Italian Boss by Fiona Harper (Mills and Boon Cherish)
A Western Heart by Liz Harris (Choc Lit Lite)
Just You by Jane Lark (Harper Impulse)
The Right Side of Mr Wrong by Jane Linfoot (Harper Impulse)
Grand Designs by Linda Mitchelmore (Choc Lit Lite)
The Bookshop on the Corner by Rebecca Raisin (Carina)


Best E-Book

The Second Time I Saw You by Pippa Croft (Penguin)
The Wedding Cake Tree by Melanie Hudson (Choc Lit)
Summer at Castle Stone by Lynn-Marie Hulsmann (Harper Impulse)
Dear Lizzie by Annie Lyons (Carina)
The Guestbook by Holly Martin (Carina)
Room For Love by Sophie Pembroke (Carina)
The Oyster Catcher by Jo Thomas (Headline)
Doubting Abbey by Samantha Tonge (Carina)


Best Author Published

Mary Bennet by Kate Allan
Sweet Occasions by Linn B Halton
Drumbeats by Julia Ibbotson
Fairlights by Jan Jones
Christmas Yves by Nicola May
A Change of Heart by Adrienne Vaughan


New Talent Award Shortlist

An Infamous Seduction by Glenda Cooper
Country Strife by Debbie Fuller-White
Fancy Cakes and Skinny Lattes by Melanie Griffiths
For One Last Time by Louise Hall
The Gossamer Trail by Brenda Hawkey
Who Does He Think He Is? by Emily Kerr
Hats Off To Love by Susan Jones
Meeting Halfway by Mairibeth MacMillan
The Perfect Blend by Catherine Meadows
True Colours by Caroline Rayner
Maggie's Child by Glynis Smy

Sarah Taylor, the Awards Organiser said, "With the highest number of entries the awards have had in their four year history, the standard this year was exceptionally high with many highly rated novels not making the shortlists. The breath and depth of quality writing in romantic fiction should be celebrated and that's what these awards are all about."
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Local Secrets is out!

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No, that's not a grammatical error!




Local Secrets is the third Penny Plain story - and it is out now from Accent Press.

Something is afoot in Salthaven - graffiti down by the harbour, a WW1 soldier missing from the town’s war memorial and a dodgy councillor exuding charm. Penny and Leo are on the trail!

Silent Testimony

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Yesterday, I went to the Tower of London to see the ceramic poppies instillation commemorating the fallen in World War One. It is most profoundly moving. Go if you can.

Silent Testimony   by Jan Jones

Poppies pour quietly from an open window
Each a broken body on a broken field far from home
In a while, the Last Post will sound
But for now this is beautiful, and tragic.
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Two minute challenge

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Okay, here's a two minute challenge for you. Take a photo NOW of what you are doing, of what you see right now, then write a poem to go with it direct to screen.

[You can take another minute for edits. Did I ever tell you how POLEAXED I was when I realised I could edit my own poetry? Before that it was just as the ink fell out of my pen.]

So, here's mine...

Hidden by Jan Jones

Only an echo left
of the afternoon's warmth
as I water

Cool English summer brushes my skin...
thin polite white wine perhaps
or genteel rosé
(neither of which has ever done anything for me)

But the colours

Oh, the colours

The colours of my planting are alive
Blazing in this well-bred air

and speak of deep Chilean fire
and sundrenched Californian excess

and I am reassured - looking at them - that there is more to me
then anyone here can tell
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Accent Press holiday collection

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Just a quick blog post to say I have an atmospheric short story - set in wonderful Greece - in the new short story collection Holiday Fling from Accent Press.

Off Visiting!

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Today I am at Lorraine Mace's blog answering various writing-related questions - and jolly taxing one or two of them were!
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What Mary Stewart Means To Me

It was the egret, flying out of the lemon-grove that started it.

This single sentence, the opening line from The Moonspinners, sums up what Mary Stewart means to me. The to-die-for sense of place expressed in just a few skilful words. The delicious hint of adventure and romance. The promise of a glorious few hours, curled up with one of my favourite authors, oblivious to the outside world. I read Mary Stewart's books over and over again, and every time, I'm transported to that precious state where nothing else matters except what I am reading.

Mary Stewart wrote romantic suspense before the genre had a name. To me as a teenager her books were adventure mixed with love and sprinkled with humour and I didn't see how the combination could possibly be bettered. (This also held true for Georgette Heyer whom I discovered at roughly the same time.) Even now, I have only to think of any Mary Stewart book and I am there. The novels come as a whole package: sights, sounds, smells. To add to the immediacy, all but one are written in the first person, so when I experience the narrative, I do so from within the heroine's skin.

My first Mary Stewart novel was Airs Above the Ground. I read it at age 12 or 13 and was hooked by her style and her voice. My all-time favourite is Touch Not the Cat, an unashamed love story with a paranormal thread. But it is her Hellenic books - This Rough Magic (1964), The Moonspinners (1962) and My Brother Michael (1959) - that captured my heart all those years ago and caused me to fall in love both with her and with Greece.

Nowadays, of course, everyone has been on holiday abroad, but at that time affordable foreign travel was in its infancy so the authors writing about Provence or Morocco or the many regions of Greece were opening their readers' eyes to a whole new world. Certainly that was how it worked for me. This Rough Magic is set on Corfu, The Moonspinners is based in Crete and My Brother Michael - perhaps the most starkly beautiful of all her books - takes place near Delphi in mainland Greece. In it the hero says, "Everyone has two countries: his own - and Greece", and such is Mary Stewart's skill that that is exactly how I felt on reading the books, despite never having been there. A lot later I went to Greece myself and felt at home from the moment of getting off the plane; the warm air, the bright curiosity of strangers, the terrain, the voices - it was all so much as I expected that I ached with the joy of being there.

The majority of Mary Stewart's romantic suspense novels can be loosely described as the story of a young woman stumbling on adventure and finding romance along the way. The landscape, whether at home or abroad, is always part of the story. I love the way she arranges darkness and humour, description and dialogue, passion and the commonplace, into a perfect whole. Light reading these books may be, but she isn't afraid of strong emotion: Nine Coaches Waiting, for example, contains some heartbreaking moments of self-sacrifice.

It is My Brother Michael that moved me the most, however. Pure chance causes Camilla Haven to deliver a hire car to Simon Lester, who is in Delphi to discover the truth about his brother Michael's death towards the end of World War II. Mary Stewart described the book as her love affair with Greece. Her affection and respect for the country and its people shines through and imprints itself indelibly on the consciousness. That was the first point. The second was that My Brother Michael introduced me to John Donne. What a thing to do to an impressionable teenager besotted with words and their rhythms! In particular Mary Stewart quotes Donne's 'No man is an island' passage and uses it to describe the hero. And he is the final reason that I fell in love with this book. Simon Lester. He is tough, fanciable, understated - and cares deeply. He is 'involved in mankind' as a matter of course. The sort of man a girl yearns to know is out there. The sort who spoils her for all others. Aragorn for the modern world.

Whether I would feel the same way now on finding Mary Stewart for the first time I don't know. I always think we are shaped by our reading, so I am the person I am because of discovering her in my teens. The fact remains that for me she has that rare gift - page-turning quality by the bagful. The best thing about being so familiar with her books is that now I can take my time enjoying each page without the what-happens-next need to rush on.

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The blog post above was one I contributed to Norman Geras's wonderfully wide ranging NORMBLOG. Many thanks to Adele Geras for agreeing to my republishing it here.

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I was incredibly sad to learn this week of Mary Stewart's death. As this post shows, I owe her a great deal, which is one reason that I dedicated FAIRLIGHTS to her. The other reason, of course, is simply that her writing is quite, quite awesome.
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My Writing Process


Lovely Lesley Cookman tagged me to carry on with the 'My Writing Process' blog hop. Lesley writes enjoyable murder-mystery novels published by Accent Press featuring her splendid amateur sleuth Libby Sarjeant.

There are only four questions, so here goes:

What am I working on?

In theory, I am working my way through editing and extending all my magazine serials, and then publishing them on Amazon Kindle. However, having just vastly expanded my romantic suspense Fairlights to the length it always should have been, a couple of spinoffs are waving at me, begging to be written. This happens to me A LOT. A secondary character in one book becomes so interesting, with such a lot of hidden backstory, that they turn into the subject of the next book. Generally this happens in sequence, but one of the Fairlights spinoffs will be a little different. When I was originally describing the house, I wrote a throwaway line of explanation ... which has since become a fully fledged storyline! So I am currently revisiting a previous genre of mine and writing Ravell’s Luck: the Regency Fairlights story!

How do my stories differ from others in genre?

Everybody writes with their own voice. Every writer has an idea of what they want to include in their story. I write in several genres (contemporary, romantic suspense, Regency, cosy mysteries), but whichever one it is, I like to think that my stories are the sort of thing that could happen to anyone - even the slightly paranormal elements.

Why do I write?

That's simple. I write because I can. And because I can’t not.

Most people have some sort of creative urge. We need the satisfaction of making something that wasn’t there before. It could be growing plants, knitting or writing computer programs. It could be painting, playing music, inventing sudoko grids, doing cross stitch or even tackling double-entry bookkeeping and seeing all the numbers adding up the way they should at the end. I feel very strongly that not doing something you have a talent for is a waste. It frets us, niggles at our minds. People should play to their strengths because it’s why we have them. I can write, I can entertain, so I do. Also it significantly reduces the likelihood of my laying waste to a large swathe of my surroundings in frustration.

How does my writing process work?

 Each book starts with an idea. A phrase, perhaps, or a character. Maybe a line of dialogue or a setting. That idea rolls around gently in my head, gathering new bits and pieces. I often scribble it all down on paper, stream-of-consciousness style, over and over again before it begins to make sense and I have a story. By the time I actually start writing I will usually know the beginning and the end. I’ll also know my characters and a few hazy milestones along the way. The rest often surprises me - and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The hard part is writing the story. I write best at night in the early stages of a book, when everything is quiet and there are no distractions. I then go over it the next day, and add some more. I repeat the process until I’m only changing the odd word here and there,
then I move on to the next section. It really is two steps back and three steps forward the whole time, but hopefully the manuscript is getting smoother and more cohesive with every iteration.

After it is finished, of course, I have to let people read it - and then the editing starts all over again!


So, that's my writing process. Next, I am passing the baton to the very talented writer Beryl Kingston. Beryl doesn't have a blog of her own, so she is being hosted by the equally splendid Jenny Haddon.
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Fairlights!

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My new book - FAIRLIGHTS - is up on Amazon.

This is my Mary Stewart book. I first discovered romantic suspense in her pages, as indeed did everyone else at the time, and I fell in love with her power of description from the first sentence. FAIRLIGHTS is dedicated to her, for the many happy hours she has given me.

FAIRLIGHTS is set on the west Cumbrian coast. It's full of stormy seas, family friction, an old house and a gorgeous, enigmatic hero. And a heroine who doesn't realise she has a problem until it dawns on her that she is missing a chunk of memory.

It's a short novel - 32Kwords - but fully formed. And it has the most gorgeous cover from the very talented Jane Dixon Smith.

[FAIRLIGHTS was first published in a very much abridged form in Woman's Weekly in 2012. It has been so lovely to flesh it out to the size it was always meant to be.]
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Penny gets her Just Desserts

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Accent Press have now published the second in my series of Penny Plain mystery novellas.

It is called Just Desserts and features Penny (of course), Leo (equally of course), ice cream, a WI show, a missing 1950s test aircraft, odd bits of rivalry, a secret lab, a daughter behaving oddly...

I think it might be best if you just bought it.

Links to Amazon.com

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My Kindle books are on Amazon.com - and indeed Amazon-dot-everywhere - so I thought I would try finding them and posting the links here.

Deep breath. Here goes:

Penny Plain 1: The Jigsaw Puzzle - An old jigsaw puzzle leads to a new phase in Penny's life

Written on the Wind: Mystery novella with Celtic trees set on the North Yorks Moors

Fortunate Wager: Secrets and subterfuge on the Regency racecourse

There, hopefully clicking on the links will take you there. For the UK links, just click on the sidebar!
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