Words on a Page

 I took a break from this blog during 2024, and now I find that we’re already a quarter of the way through 2025. So, I thought it was time for a check in. During the time I've been away I haven't been sitting back twiddling my thumbs. Instead, I’ve been busy organising book markets for the Portsmouth Authors Collective, presenting our weekly Book Club on VictoryOnline.com and, more importantly, finishing up my ‘big’ novel. More on that later. Now though, I'll share a few photos from our fabulous PAC markets and from our monthly Speak Volumes evenings. Speak volumes, which takes place at The Hideaway, a friendly local café in Southsea, is where we get together to read from and share news about our current writing. It's a great way for PAC members to gain confidence reading to the public and talking about their books, and each month we welcome new members and hear new stories. Christine Lawrence, Derek Nudd and me with a table full of books by local authors Dave Flint, ...

  Let me start off by saying that I love Cormac McCarthy , and at the time of his death last summer I'd read all but his last two novels, ThePassenger and Stella Maris (which at the time were only available in hardback). I love his use of archaic, biblical and inventive language as well as the demands he puts on his readers—you don’t turn to McCarthy for an easy, straightforward read. His novels deal with complex themes (Love, Death, Violence, the nature of Good and Evil, and the nature of God), and you get the sense that McCarthy, himself, is grappling for understanding of both the world he has been cast into and the worlds he has created. The Passenge r is no different—in fact, in many ways, it is even more challenging for its lack of a traditional narrative structure: a beginning, a middle and an ending. On the surface, T he Passenger feels familiar. It feels like genre fiction . When Bobby Western and a fellow salvage diver investigate a small plane that has crashed in th...

The past few months have been filled with activities revolving around the Portsmouth Authors Collective - all of which have have required lots of time and energy and organisation - things that are in short supply in my world. Hence, it 's been a shameful length of time since I posted my last author interview.   Forgive me. * The Portsmouth Authors Collective   seeks to put the spotlight on local talent who live in and/or take inspiration from the city and its surrounding areas. I was thrilled, therefore, to be asked to interview Richard Salsbury a couple of months ago at the launch of his debut novel Mute . Here, we reprise that interview for this blog and for the PAC website .    Author Bio: Richard Salsbury is a novelist and award-winning short story writer based in the south of England. His work has appeared in Artificium , Flash Fiction Magazine , World Wide Writers , Portsmouth News , the FairlightBooks website and on BBC Radio. He is an editor and websit...

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration claimed that tax breaks for corporations and the nation’s highest earners would spur economic growth and allow wealth to ‘ trickle-down ’ to those on the lower end of the economic scale. It was a lie, of course. Money doesn’t trickle down. It pools at the feet of the already wealthy. Reaganomics only led to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer at a faster rate than before. For anyone who graduated from high school, went to university, got married, and generally came of age in the United States in the 1980s, Cris Mazza’s short story collection  Trickle-Down Timeline  brings that decade into sharp focus again.  ‘For ten or twenty years after leaving home,’ the narrator of ‘What If’   tells us, ‘there’s little nostalgia about where you came from.’ As young adults, loose upon the wider world, the hometowns we moved away from – some of us as soon as we possibly could – held little attraction. The same can be sa...

  The Portsmouth Authors Collective seeks to put the spotlight on local talent who live in or take inspiration from the city and its surrounding areas. Today’s interview is with the poet and debut novelist Tina Cathleen MacNaughton.   Author Bio: Tina Cathleen MacNaughton has written and published four books: a collection of poetry entitled On the Shoulders of Lions (The Choir Press, 2021); two children’s books, When the Elves Rescued Christmas and Santa’s Still Asleep (WriteRhymes, 2020 and 2021), and a novel with a 1980s music background Delphy Rose – the Girl Who Wrote Songs (Troubador). ~ Loree:  Welcome to my blog, Tina. And thanks for agreeing to be interviewed. Every time I scroll through Facebook, lately, I see that another of your poems has been accepted for publication. What is your biggest achievement to date? Tina: Finishing and publishing my novel Delphy Rose . It was my dream to publish a novel before I was fifty. I am eight years late, but w...

  So far in this series of interviews with writers from the Portsmouth Authors Collective , I've focussed on novelists. But we also have many non-fiction writers in the Collective, and in this interview I speak with Paul Newell who has published numerous books on Portsmouth History, as well as books on a number of other historical subjects. Author Bio:  Paul was born in Portsmouth and returned after studying in London. He now works as an HR Manager. A keen genealogist, Paul has a passion for local history and in recent years has been researching the history of Portsmouth during Victorian and Edwardian times. Paul’s first publication, Shocking Tales from Victorian Portsmouth , was a huge success, and several books around these topics have followed. ~ Loree: Welcome to my blog, Paul. It’s great to have you hear. Let’s jump right in. You write historical non-fiction. How did it all start?   Paul: I was researching some family info after I found out a great grandfathe...