Yesterday I finished the final edits to my short story collection, ‘A Cold Dish and Other Tales’ as suggested by my editor, my daughter Marianne. I ordered ten copies of ‘Bunco’ which I’m going to try to sell at events in our village this summer. I also had a coffee with a former neighbour, and best-selling author Peter Smith. Peter has kindly agreed to read ‘Bunco’ and give me his feedback. I await this with some trepidation!

In short, the decks are cleared for my next effort – ‘Empress’. This time the main protagonist, at least for the first section of the book, is a ship, a luxury liner built on the Clyde in 1929. The ship and its story bear more than a passing resemblance to the ‘Empress of Britain’, but I will be taking liberties with the historical facts at every turn.

It’s exciting to be embarking on a new writing journey, which will have an entirely different ‘voice’ than my first efforts. This time I want to develop more complex characters as well as telling a good story and painting pictures of a series of radically different lives in a very different era.

So, much more research required and, I suspect, not quite as free-flowing a writing task as ‘Bunco’ turned out.

We’ll see.