Alison May – alison may, amelia berry & ally sinclair

How I wrote a novel in 4 weeks*

*not actually a novel, a first draft**

** not even a whole first draft really…

Anyway it was a big old hunk of writing and I’ve been documenting the process on my Instagram here, so you’re very welcome to go watch all that back, but now I’ve made it to the finish line I thought it deserved a longer debrief so I have a full YouTube video with the whole process, what I learned from doing it, and my tips for writing faster. Enjoy

While you’re here, making a living through writing is super tricky right now. Authors’ incomes are falling, and bills very much are not, so if you are able and you enjoy what I write it would be lovely if you could drop me a couple of quid by way of acknowledgement or thanks. I believe people generally say ‘buy me a coffee’ but I don’t like coffee and I’m lactose intolerant. So buy me a soya milk hot chocolate?

The things you just can’t say

You hear the phrase ‘you just can’t say anything any more’ a lot. Most often in comments from people parodying the kind of people they imagine say ‘you just can’t say anything any more,’ but second most often from people who have just said something horrid and been criticised for it. Obviously what they actually mean is ‘you can’t say anything without people responding and questioning it any more,’ which is a very different complaint.

But I do think there are some things that it appears certain people can not say. Here’s one: ‘In the UK we need to raise taxes.’

That really shouldn’t be a controversial statement. We spent a shedload* during Covid and in response to Brexit. We were already pretty broke after the 2008 financial crisis, and governments since then have pursued different versions of austerity to the point where our basic day-to-day lived experiences tell us that there is really nothing left to cut. Ambulances take ages to come. Police are acting as a mental health emergency service. Local councils are going bankrupt. If we want our public services to function better they have to be paid for.

And I can say that, but we seem to have created a politics where politicians can’t. We’ve tarred the Labour party, in particular, with the label of being financially irresponsible, which means that successive Labour leaders feel bound to go into each new election cycle with a promise not to raise taxes. Which is insane. Tax is pretty much the main lever the government has control of to do… well anything. Nothing else promised in a manifesto means anything if it’s accompanied by a promise that takes the main option for paying for it out of play before the party is even in government.

We also need tax reform. Too many forms of UK taxation (pretty much all of them apart from good old income tax) aren’t properly progressive and don’t proportionally hit those who can most afford to pay, but tax reform isn’t a sexy policy, and raising taxes is never going to be an instinctively popular one. Which means that we are running a whole political system where our politicians permanently have one hand tied behind the back because they can’t say the thing they must all know to be true. To fund functioning services they need to raise more money.

And functioning public services save the country – and individuals – money long term. A well run, prompt health service saves sick days and benefits payments. It keeps people in work and earning. A well-funded police service reduces crime. A properly functioning prison and probation service reduces reoffending, which saves the country money and and individuals pain.

But so long as we have a media, and a public, who refuse to hear unpleasant things – like ‘this is likely to require tax increases’ – then none of those improvements are going to happen. And we’ve created a media landscape where a lot of people only consume ‘news’ and opinion that tell them things they want to hear, so telling people things they don’t want to hear is seen as electoral insanity. And so here we are trapped, with a struggling public services and nothing but anger to fix them with.

And that’s today’s post. I did write one last week, but I didn’t post it. It felt too much like shouting into the void. But this week I’m back, whispering quietly into the void, sort of tapping the void on the shoulder and muttering ‘I’m sorry. Would you mind awfully taking a look at this?’ I hope the void enjoys it.

*technical ecomonics term there

(Re)starting a blog in 2025…

Back through the mists of time this website was basically just a blog where I pontificated about whatever random stuff had wandered across my consciousness. Blogging was very much The Modern Thing at the time, but now in August 2025 it’s three years since I posted anything at all, and seven since my last attempt to post regularly, so what on earth am I doing here now?

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure. It’s 2025. If I want to pontificate I should probably have a Substack or communicate my thoughts through the medium of viral dance trend on TikTok. But both of those sound like a) a lot of effort and b) like they’ll be every bit as out of fashion as old school blogging in another five years time, so here we are.

I think the reason I woke up this morning though and thought, ‘Let’s restart an entirely defunct blog’ was a growing frustration with social media and the way conversations online tend to descend into argument and ‘Well, actually’ and exchanges that are all about winning or being seen to be right, rather than engaging, listening or, indeed, actually being right. And sometimes that’s fair enough – when you’re dealing with a troll, polite discourse doesn’t necessarily cut it – but other times it just makes me weary, and I turn into a grumpy old woman who thinks the world is losing its manners and its nuance.

And I don’t like the grumpy version of me. I don’t want to be chuntering at the modern world. I want to be engaged with it. I used to think of myself as being quite political, but it feels like political conversations are so toxic now that I’ve backed away. And that backing away is part of the problem. Backing away leaves a big empty space for bigots and zealots to fill.

So restarting this blog is, I guess, me trying to step back into that space but in a way that hopefully feels less fighty and more thoughtful than just shouting in the comments on semi-strangers’ Facebook posts.

I make no promises to be here on any sort of schedule – ‘most weeks’ is the vague intention, but who knows? I am going to try at least to write stuff here about what’s on my mind, about the world we’re navigating through, about the bits of it that scare me, and the bits of it that bring me joy. Or if that’s too much some weeks I might just not, or I might share some pictures of cake instead. We will very much see how it goes.

In which I think about creativity and falling in (or out) of love with writing

Ahoy there! Welcome to the blog. Or perhaps welcome back to the blog. I see that I haven’t been to play here since 2019, so a little catch up is probably in order to get things started.

*checks diary for the last 2.5 years*

On the other hand, we could ignore 2020 and 2021, pretend that it’s still 2019, and that worst thing to happen to any of us recently was being slightly non-plussed with the ending of Game of Thrones, and just crack on from there.

Deal? Good.

The reason for blowing the dust off the bloggy blog blog was that I wanted to muse a while about creativity. There is – full disclosure – an element of shameless promotion here, because these musings are totally related to the brand new online course I currently have running with Romance Writers of Australia. That course is rather wordily entitled Reigniting Creativity and Finding Your Voice and is a self-paced online course, aimed at anyone who wants to find ways to be more creative or who has maybe fallen out of love with writing a bit. And that’s what I want to talk about today.

Most of us who write – whether it’s novels or poetry or screenplay or extended dragon based battle scenes that lose sight of multiple seasons of thoughtful character development – start writing because we love it. We love the creativity. We love exploring our imaginations. And it’s a huge privilege to be able to take that love and turn it in to even a small part of your career.

Which makes it a bit awkward when, for whatever reason, we’re really not enjoying writing. And I don’t mean that ‘some days go better than others’ sort of not enjoying it. Or the ‘well it takes me a while to get going but once I’m in the flow all is good’ sort of not enjoying it. I mean the ‘What is ‘in the flow’? I do not remember that and suspect you’ve just made up a thing’ form of not enjoying it. With shades of the ‘Maybe I could retire. That’s a thing people do. I could get another job and never have to write another word again’ sort of not enjoying it. I’m talking about the point where the thing that you loved, and worked so hard to be able to do for a considerable portion of your week, is about as enticing as burying yourself in quick drying cement.

And there are all sorts of reasons a writer might feel that way. The publishing industry is tough. Months, or years, of rejection and nearly-but-not-quites do get you down. Writing with a voice in your head asking if this is what the market really wants can be wearing. And writing for publication is a treadmill – one set up with a ridiculously high gradient and no option to step off. When you finish one novel, you gotta start the next. Over time the well you’re drawing from – your own imagination and creativity – can be emptied. Add to that all of the stresses that affect us all – health, family, the imminent death of the planet we call home – and finding a creative spark can get tough.

And that toughness can be difficult to talk about. We all know that publishing is tough and we all know – because as writers we tell each other it constantly – that all you can do is just keep on keeping on. So when keeping going with writing feels impossible or overwhelming or panic-inducing it can be hard to admit it, even to yourself.

So I came up with the idea for the Reigniting Creativity course thinking that if I felt that way, other writers might as well. And writing the course really helped me. Normally when I write a course on some element of writing or editing, I’m trying to work out the most effective ways of sharing some knowledge or tools with my students. In this case I was really thinking about what I needed and what might be useful for me to try, and what I’ve created is one of the most personal and the most practical courses I’ve ever put together. More than being a learning programme, I think of it as a form of couples’ therapy for you and your writing mojo – a chance to reconnect, rediscover why you fell in love to begin with, and work out how to keep the spark alive going forward.

Writing it helped me. Genuinely, there’s one particular tool from the very last section of the course that I’m using week in week out as part of my writing practice to help me stay creative and remember that writing can be joyful. And you don’t have to be in the midst of a full blown writing breakdown to sign up. You can also do that just because it might be fun. I just hope that following the course will help some of you get your creativity flowing.

In which I have a brand new book

A very brief post today, just to say that I have a brand new book coming out very soon. This is very exciting for a number of reasons, which I shall innumerate for you now.

1. It has the most beautiful cover anyone anywhere in the whole wide world has ever seen. Look at it. Just look. See how simple, yet elegant it is…

I properly love this cover and am thinking of asking it to run away with me to the South of France and open a guest house near the sea. It really is that pretty.

2. This book is a proper book of the heart. It’s a book I’ve had bubbling away in the back of my head for years and years and years. Because of the weird two-speed way in which publishing works – either lightening fast or fossilization slow – I actually finished the bulk of the writing and revising two years ago. So it’s been a long journey, and now it’s nearly here. I’m super excited for the world to meet Patience, and Patrice, and Leo and… anyway, here’s the blurb:

In 1967 Patience Bickersleigh is a teenager who discovers a talent for telling people what they want to hear. Fifty years later she is Patrice Leigh, a nationally celebrated medium. But cracks are forming in the carefully constructed barriers that keep her real history at bay.

Leo is the journalist hired to write Patrice’s biography. Struggling to reconcile the demands of his family, his grief for his lost son, and his need to understand his own background, Leo becomes more and more frustrated at Patrice’s refusal to open up.

Because behind closed doors, Patrice is hiding more than one secret. And it seems that now, her past is finally catching up with her.

3. It was the first book my fantastic agent, Julia Silk, sold for me and it was the book she offered me representation based on. And Julia is a very wise and very brilliant so for her to love this book was a proper moment of joy in my life.

I’m excited to be getting close to being able to share All That Was Lost with readers. It’s out on September 6th in ebook and paperback, and you can order your copy right now.

In which I am writing a new book

When I venture out from my lovely purple writing room and go into the big wide world to do authorly type events, it’s quite common to be asked how I approach writing a novel. It’s something other writers are often particularly interested in. We tend to view each other’s methods like a weirdly judgmental anthropologist meeting a new culture – we’re interested, fascinated even, but ultimately convinced that all these strange alien ways of doing things are Very Wrong. Anyway, here’s a snapshot of how I do the writing thing…

I’m currently around about 15000 words into the first draft of my new book. For those of you who don’t routinely count the words in every novel you read, a finished commercial fiction novel is likely to be somewhere in the 80-100,000 word region, so I’ve still got a long way to go.

And here’s something I very rarely hear writer-chums say about this early stage of a first draft: It’s truly horrible. I hate it.

There is no one right way to write a novel, but my approach goes something like this:

Have an idea.
Make lots of notes and convince self that idea is good.
Start writing book (completely ignoring all those notes).
Watch as idea slowly grows and develops in weird, unexpected and uncontrolled directions.
Spend period from around 2000 words to around 70000 words hating the whole idea and deciding it’s too random and amorphous and will never form a nice coherent whole.
Abandon whole idea.
Cry.
Reread idea so far, work out which bits are salvageable, write lots of new bits, edit all the bits with a viciousness that in any other context would be something of a worry.
Submit book.

From stages 4 to 7 hating the book is normal – at least it is for me – but stages 4 to 7 are still essential because they’re the way that my brain gets to stage 8 where the book actually gets written. And I can’t do it the alternate way where you plan the whole book in detail before you start writing, and thus avoid the feeling that the story is an uncontrolled amorphous blob. If I do that then I basically have no interest in writing the book because I already know everything that happens.

So what I have to come up with are novel-writing coping strategies and plans to get myself, and my poor innocent unsuspecting book, through stages 4-7. The first of these coping strategies is nicked from the very wise and awesome Julie Cohen and is simply this:

write-crap

That’s the whiteboard next to my desk this very morning, and it’s a reminder that it’s fine for what I’m writing to be awful at the moment. In fact it’s essential. It’s part of how I write. The book will be bad before it’s good. And that’s ok.

The second thing I always tell myself is this: ‘If you’re at less than 65,000 words it should still be getting more complicated.’ This is because I tend to try to wrap things up too simply and write too neatly from A to B – that’s part of the reason planning too much doesn’t suit me; I end up writing the most direct and efficient route from plot point 1 to plot point 2 which isn’t necessarily great storytelling. The blob of the book should still be getting messier and more amorphous. However h0rrible that feels, it’s right and good and essential.

And finally, I remember that I always feel like this. I’m a writer who routinely ditches tens of thousands of words from draft manuscripts and adds new scenes at the final edit stage. That’s just how I work, and it’s always horrendous in the midst of the ‘writing crap’ phase. But if I keep going and write enough crap, then I get to edit, and, again unlike a lot of writers, I do very much like to edit. So, must get bad words down so that I can make them better later. You can’t edit a blank page.

So there you go, a little snapshot of this particular writer’s mind. Other writers will do it differently, probably more sensibly, and that’s fine. There is, after all, no one right way to write a novel.

If you are a writer and you’d like help finding your personal right way to write a novel, then take a look here for details of upcoming courses. There are still places on the Spring Writing Retreat where you get the benefit of not just one writing tutor’s approach but two, as I’ll be co-tutoring with the much more organised Janet Gover.

And if you’d like to get a book that’s in its shiny, polished, (hopefully) non-crap stage, then there are some here.

In which I think about teaching

I’ve been a bit of a lax bloggificator of late. I had a good run back there in October/November of posting every week, but I think, if we’re honest, we all knew that wasn’t going to last didn’t we? At some point, it was really inevitable that I’d become distracted by cheese or an interesting stain on my pyjama top or something twitter reckoned and I’d forget to do blogging. So sorry about that. I’m back now though, and feeling like I’ve already missed the window for doing the traditional start of year resolution post. If you feel you’re missing out then just read last year’s or the year before.

I don’t want to diss the whole resolution notion, which I am generally a huge fan of, but my resolutions really are basically exactly the same – lose weight, get over the driving terror, read more, write more/better. So there we go – 2016; in terms of good intentions it’s really very much like 2015.

However, I do have one further more general resolution. In 2016 I shall do more stuff that makes me happy. It’s ridiculously easy to while away time in the modern world by automatically picking up one’s phone and scrolling through some random bits of internet. And sometimes a random bit of internet can be jolly. I very much hope that you’re enjoying this random bit of internet, for example, but overall trying to keep up with everything that is reckoned on the internet is a real time suck. So less of that in 2016 and more actually doing stuff, like making cake, or reading a proper book, or learning how to thread my sewing machine without swearing a lot.*

I’m also resolved to try really hard in 2016 to build up my creative writing tutoring. There are good and sensible reasons for doing this. It involves getting paid, which is a rare and beautiful thing in a writer’s life. It also involves making use of some bits of my ridiculously overlong education. But mainly I want to do more tutoring because I absolutely bloody love it.

There are very few activities more fun than talking to developing writers about writing and helping them work out what sort of writer they want to be. The moment where you see a student realise something, or understand an idea for the first time, is just ridiculously good fun. So I’m aiming to spend a fair amount of 2016 doing just that. I’ve got four courses in the schedule already, including two weekend retreats with my regular co-conspirator, Janet Gover, and I’m, as always, open to offers to come and run workshops with writing groups. All I need now are some students… Roll up! Roll up! I promise to send you home inspired, invigorated, and probably slightly knackered.

* This may not be possible. I suspect the swearing is actually an integral part of the process without which the little foot thingy won’t click down properly and the needle bit won’t bob.

In which I have to remember not to lick the books

I’ve been a bit lax in the blog posting the last couple of weeks. This is largely because I’ve been mentally trying to compose a post about the Labour leadership campaign that isn’t just a series of video clips of me banging my head against a wall and then weeping gently, probably ending with a section where I jump up and down repeatedly on a picture of Tony Blair’s increasingly haunted face. I’m not sure that a post like that would really count as insightful or, indeed, interesting.

However, it’s so clear that generating a coherent opinion about Andy Burnham is basically my moral duty as a left-leaning bod with a blog and an interest in politics, that it’s hampered my attempts to blog about anything else. Fortunately today’s post brought something that absolutely, definitely has to be shared with the universe right now this very second.

Are you ready?

Ta dah!

Actual print copies of my actual novel, Sweet Nothing. Actually printed out, so you can actually hold them, and cuddle them, and lick them.* There are lots of different novelist milestones – your first finished draft; your first finished draft that’s in a state where you could plausibly show it to another human being; your first rejection; your first non-standard rejection; your first contract; your first publication day; your first review; your first horrible review; the first time one of your books gets pirated etc. And in the modern world you can do all of those without ever having a printed book. So having a printed book shouldn’t logically make you feel like any more of a ‘proper writer’ than you were the day before. You’ve still written, edited and promoted the book – all that’s changed is that somebody quite unrelated to you has had the thing printed out and glued together. But still. It’s a book. An actual lickable** book. And it’s very very exciting indeed.

So there you go. A book. It’s out in paperback on August 7th, and by total coincidence the day before that is my birthday, so next week goes my birthday and then book birthday. If you check out my twitter feed (@MsAlisonMay) next Thursday (August 6th) there might even be a special #BirthdayGiveaway to win a signed copy, which would then be yours to keep, and, if you wanted, lick. Or just read. That’s probably a better idea really…

About Sweet Nothing

Would you risk everything for love?

Independent, straight-talking Trix Allen wouldn’t. She’s been in love once before and ended up with nothing. Now safely single, Trix is as far away from the saccharine-sweet world of hearts and flowers as it’s possible to be.

Ben Messina is the man who broke Trix’s heart. Now he’s successful the only thing rational Ben and free-spirited Trix see eye-to-eye on is the fact that falling in love isn’t part of the plan. But when Ben’s brother sets out to win the heart of Trix’s best friend, romance is very much in the air. Will Trix gamble everything on love and risk ending up with zero once again?

A modern retelling of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. First novel in the 21st Century Bard series.

And you can pre-order the paperback or pick up the ebook for just 99 of your modern English pennies here.

*I haven’t been licking them. Honestly I haven’t.

** Still wrong. I’ll add ‘books’ to my list of Things I Must Not Lick.***

*** List also includes David Tennant, other people’s cake, and leading literary agents.

In which six is the magic number

My publisher, Choc Lit, is six years old today, which is lovely. Well, it’s lovely up to a point. Beyond that, having a publisher who doesn’t want to discuss your edits because they had too much ice cream before they went on the swings and so now they feel sicky is less than ideal. Despite those reservations, a birthday is still a thing to be celebrated, so in the spirit of ‘sixiness’ here are six things I’m thinking about right this second…

1. Turning to crime

Not actual crime. That would be bad. Being bad is generally considered to be one of the defining characteristics of actual crime, but I am thinking about fictional crime. Yesterday I went to see a panel of frankly awesome crime writers talk at the Worcestershire LitFest. The panel was made up of CL Taylor, Sarah Hilary, Clare Mackintosh and Alex Marwood, all of whom are bestsellers and utterly brilliant writers. A couple of things really stood out – both CL Taylor and Alex Marwood started their writing careers writing books that were marketed as chick lit before turning to crime, and Clare Mackintosh actually turned down a potential offer to publish an earlier book before her astounding breakout debut hit, I Let You Go. All of which made me think a lot about writing and publishing as a career and how easy or difficult it is to switch genres or to write in multiple genres and hmmm… well… thoughts.

2. I bloody love teaching

I’ve been properly snowed under with work recently. I’m marking a lot at the moment, promoting one book, trying to finish writing another and I’ve recently joined the committee of the RNA, which is brilliant but also time-consuming. And then on Saturday afternoon I had an afternoon off. Well not actually ‘off’ – I had an afternoon standing at the front of a class with a flipchart talking about plot and character and trying to help five developing authors get to grips with their own works in progress, and it was immense fun, so much fun that, compared with the days and day of bum-on-seat time I’ve had recently, it almost felt like an afternoon off. Brilliant students, an excellent worked example of a character arc interacting with an external plot (courtesy of Terry Pratchett and Guards! Guards!) and a generally all round lovely afternoon.

3. My new book baby is out there in the world

Midsummer Dreams was published on Friday. You probably didn’t know that. I barely bang on about it at all. The early reviews have been lovely and positive though, which is always a huge relief. Until the first reviews appear there’s always a possibility that nobody else on the planet will understand what on earth you were trying to do with a novel, but fortunately at least some people seem to love this one. Happy dances all around! If you’d like to download a copy for yourself this is the place.

4. The Labour leadership contest is getting me down

So it’s fairly well documented that I’m a bit of a lefty, well ok, quite a lot of a lefty, so I should be following the Labour leadership contest with great interest. Unfortunately all I’ve been able to muster so far is great disillusionment. I can’t even bring myself to type a proper rant about how disappointing the candidates all are. That’s how disillusioning the whole thing is. *sigh*

5. Fatness and cake

I’m currently on attempt 728 to get my weight under control. My current system involves good old fashioned bribery as the incentive, as EngineerBoy has been persuaded to sponsor me £1 for every 1lb I lose. So far I’ve made £4. Yeah baby!

The current biggest downside of the weight loss plan is that it really curtails the amount of baking I can justify doing. I love baking – it’s like magic for people who don’t have sufficient attention span to actually learn how to cut a lady in half, or, if you prefer, it’s like science for people who only have eggs, butter and flour to experiment with. Baking is awesome, but it very often leads to cake, and cake, very often, leads to fatitude. Again *sigh*

6. And finally, I am thinking about Christmas

Because my current work-in-progress is the third (and possibly final, but never say never) Christmas Kisses book, so for the third year in a row May and June have been soundtracked by White Christmas and Band Aid. No spoilers about the book other than to say it will be Christmassy and there will probably be some kissing.

So there you go. There are six things that are on my mind right now. What’s everyone else thinking about?

In which I reread an old classic

I’m currently rereading Emily Bronte’s masterpiece, Wuthering Heights. It’s probably the fourth or fifth time I’ve read the book – the first was when I was about 17, and the most recent was seven or eight years ago when I read it as part of my Creative Writing degree course. Having read it so many times and studied it at university I would have said, with confidence, that Wuthering Heights was a novel I knew pretty well, but here’s a newsflash from the current rereading: it’s absolutely nothing like I remember it. There are whole sections that I don’t remember at all, and some of the bits I thought I did remember are quite quite different from how I remembered them. This is odd, because it’s, obviously, still the same book. In fact, in this case, it’s physically, literally, actually the same book that I’ve read before, but the experience of reading it is completely different.

I think there are reasons for this, and I don’t think any of them are that aliens have come to earth and rewritten bits of Wuthering Heights, which is a shame, because that would have made an awesome blog post.

The non-alien related reasons are twofold:

1. I’ve changed

Well given that the book hasn’t changed, that leaves the reader as the only remaining variable, so if the thing I’m looking at isn’t different, but the experience of looking is, then that must be down to me. The things I’m picking up on during this reading are far more to do with the characters and far less to do with the brooding atmosphere and oppressive moor. This might be because I’ve moved on as a writer since I last read the book, and am currently fixated by character in terms of how I plot and revise my own writing. I’m noticing, for the first time, how complex, and essentially unpleasant, the minor characters are. Joseph, Nellie Dean, Mr Lockwood are all astonishingly self-involved in their own different ways.

I’m also noticing how dated the prose style is, and how slow the opening chapters are, which I don’t remember picking up on before. I’m actually quite impressed with my seventeen-year-old self for sticking with it. Again – that’s the writer in me coming through, and noticing deviations from the contemporary received wisdom about how to start and pace a novel.

It’s not the first time I’ve had a book change in front of me on rereading. I started Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day about eight times and couldn’t get past the first chapter, until one random day when I sat down and read about two-thirds of the book in one sitting. The book hadn’t changed, but something about my mood on that one given day married with the story and away we went together.

2. Some novels end up bigger than the novel itself

Wuthering Heights is the poster book for novels that exist in the public imagination in a completely different form from how the are on the page. Wuthering Heights has been adapted and retold in films, on TV, in musicals (thanks for that Cliff), and nearly all the retellings underplay the bleakness of the original novel. Somehow that perception of Wuthering Heights as a romantic story of star-crossed lovers on a windswept, but ultimately picturesque, moor, seeps into our consciousness, even if we’ve read the actual book and know it isn’t really like that. The idea of Heathcliff and Cathy as a slightly more consumptive Romeo and Juliet is stuck in our collective memories, even if none of us actually remember where it came from.

So there you go. Wuthering Heights – it’s not at all how you think you remember it. After this I shall be going to see Romeo and Juliet again with fingers crossed that I might have misremembered that ending. In the meantime, feel free to chat to me in the comments. What do you think of Wuthering Heights? Are there any books that have surprised you on rereading, or have turned out to be completely different from your expectations?

And finally, a quick reminder that my new Christmas Kisses novella, Cora’s Christmas Kiss, is out now for kindle.