Out Late with Friends and Regrets (61 page)

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Cover design by Bradley
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Paddy’s Daddy Publishing

For Jean, who lit the blue
touchpaper
; and my mother, who always had an exaggerated opinion of my
abilities.

Thank you Helen Sedgwick of
Wildland
Literary Editors, for mentoring and truth; Laura
Marney
and tutors Davy Fernandez, Marc
Sherland
David Pettigrew, Linda Jackson, Magi Gibson and Ian McPherson, and all my fellow-students at Strathclyde and Glasgow; my friends in the
Kategroup
; everybody at
Weegie
Wednesday; the talented authors I have met at events who have all been generous and kind; author
Juli
Townsend; audience members; my tutors at
YMCAfit
; colleagues at North Lanarkshire Leisure and all my lovely class participants. Thanks also to Linda Connolly of Silk Purse Photography for the author-photograph

Thanks to friends and family. Particular thanks to all at
Paddy’s Daddy Publishing
.

Fate, and authors, love to lob grenades of chance into settled (if uncomfortable) lives. Thus are their creatures tested, and forced to change or go under.

From about five years ago, fragments of this story began to come to me like short lengths of film, and I started to write random individual scenes in a shiny yellow notebook from Woolworths. I tried out names, made thumbnails of characters and so on, till I had a literary ragbag of pieces and a total commitment to write the book. The cast didn’t always do as expected; you’ll often hear writers say that, and it’s true; the characters start to lead independent lives. And then when I thought I’d finished, the tone was too uneven; thank goodness for the overview of an expert.
It resulted in much rewriting and the removal of some very dark stuff, all of which revitalised the (shorter) whole.
Now I’m sure it’s finished.

There are two main characters (a
bogof
!) in my new book, now under construction. However, as I’m only a quarter of the way through, I’m not sure yet what their intentions are. It’s sure as hell not going to take five years to find out, this time.

Inspirations for the book include Douglas Kennedy for his storytelling,
V.G.Lee
and Laura
Marney
for their quirky humour, and Kate Atkinson for her bounteous, shimmering prose.

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The unexpected death of Maggie
Sayer’s
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Training as a therapeutic counsellor provides this focus, bringing Maggie into contact with people who desperately need her help. Julie and her children are living in fear of an abusive husband, Janet is crumbling under the weight of a secret she has kept for over forty years, and Karen has never recovered from her mother’s violent death.
Maggie is drawn into each client’s problems as she seeks to empower them to move on with their lives. And then she is faced with her own ethical dilemma when she meets Peter...

Buy it now at Paddy’s Daddy Publishing