It has been a busy term, and has flown by, which is my poor excuse for not blogging for months.

Mid-February saw the launch of The God of All Small Boys, Joe Lamb’s wonderful novel set against the backdrop of Dundee during WW1. It was lovely to share his joy on publication day, as in 2014 we were both shortlisted for the Dundee Great War Children’s Book Prize, along with John Fulton, who won with his fabulous spy story, The Wreck of the Argyll. It’s lovely that all three of us are now published authors, and are all part of Clan Cranachan! Both The God of All Small Boys and The Wreck of the Argyll have stunning covers designed by Anne Glennie of Cranachan Books, and Anne has also created the beautiful cover for my latest novel, The Titanic Detective Agency.

February also saw the launch of Guardians of the Wild Unicorns, my Scottish Highlands set adventure story of two children battling to save the world’s last herd of wild unicorns.

In the weeks leading up to my launch I became more and more anxious about the  prospect of delivering a speech to a non-existent audience and I’m so grateful to the family members, colleagues, friends, pupils and parents who came along on the night and made the event a success. Thank you all!  Guardians was Scottish Book Trust’s Book of the Month in February, sales have been good and a second print is underway, which is brilliant news. The US edition comes out on the 30th of April.

As soon as the launch of Guardians of the Wild Unicorns was over, planning for the launch of The Titanic Detective Agency began and my anxiety is growing again, although this is time it’s worse, as it seems a big ask to expect people to come out and listen to me chat about books again so soon!

Despite the nerves, I’m excited, as I’m really looking forward to publication of The Titanic Detective Agency. It has been a fascinating story to research, and I’ve loved writing about real children, Titanic passengers Bertha Watt, Johan Cervin Svensson and Madge Collyer.

A couple of weeks ago, I managed to get in touch with Bertha Watt’s granddaughter Nancy to tell her about the book. She replied, saying she remembers her granny doing a CBC interview in Vancouver and telling the interviewer that her mother took over rowing the lifeboat as the deckhand wasn’t very good.  It was amazing to hear from Nancy. Experiences like that  don’t happen when I’m writing about fictional characters!

The Titanic Detective Agency comes out on the 15th April and the launch is at 6.30pm on the 25th of April at Waterstones in Braehead.  Do come along if you can.

This term, writing has had to take a back seat to school work and I’ve also been busy creating teachers’ resources for both Guardians of the Wild Unicorns and The Titanic Detective Agency.  During the Easter holidays I’m hoping to begin to focus on  a new writing project, but I’m all too aware that I’ve done very little creating writing in recent months, because I just haven’t had the time or energy. Therefore, I’ve made the decision to retire from teaching in the summer so that I can focus full time on writing and on doing more school visits, festivals and author events.  Early retirement is a scary but exciting prospect, and has been made even more exciting by recent invitations to come to the Tidelines Festival in September and Ness Book Festival in October. Hopefully, it’ll be less of an early retirement and more the launch of a new career!