Rae of Light

Originally a guest post on Rita Carla Monticelli's blog. Before settling down to writing and self-publishing I used to be a full time teacher in an inner city London school. Regardless of the country you teach in, anyone will tell you this is a challenging environment. Very quickly into my teaching practice I realised I had a knack for communicating with children with Special Needs (SEN as it’s called here in the UK). Most times when people think of Special Needs they latch onto the idea of a child with learning difficulties. Several times during my 13 year teaching stint I was reminded that while the majority of my students did indeed have these difficulties there were others whose behaviour marked them as SEN when in fact they were highly intelligent. Their lack of engagement with the average classroom content and insular or confrontational attitude masked their talent. At the very start of my teaching career, a...

Originally a guest post which featured on Murder Underground Broke the Camel's Back First of all I have to state categorically that I did not plan on writing Palindrome . I was adamant there would be no sequel to my debut novel Six Dead Men as I was already working on several other ideas. Denial is futile. This prequel insisted on being written. Its conception is due to a vivid dream I had in which a woman was remembering the day her baby was born. I woke with the realisation that it was Robert’s mother I was hearing. I grabbed a notebook and hastily jotted down the gist of what she had to say. At the time I was concentrating on other projects but several of the characters kept demanding I tell the world more about them. So Six Degrees a la Kevin Bacon style was conceived. It’s a series of 6 vignettes which focus on the back story of Six Dead Men . This little collection hints at links between characters and situations.   I thought this would mollify my nagging cha...

A Palindrome Character Interview  Originally featured as a guest post on Ian Richard's website Ideally we’d like to be interviewing Robert right now, but if you've read Six Dead Men you'll be well aware, he’s solitary, preferring the worlds tucked between the covers of a good book. So we’ll leave him be and turn instead to someone who knew him well while he was living in Haddington: Gabriel Haskey, school librarian at Knox Academy, now retired and living in Crete. Interview Mr Haskey – it wasn’t so long ago that you knew Robert fairly well. What was he like when he was at Knox Academy? Robert hasn’t changed all that much. I haven’t seen him since his 15th birthday. But he writes me long thought provoking letters. Always been a deep thinker. Likes his own company. Reads voraciously. What’s the first thing you notice about Robert? His nose is always stuck in a book. What was his relationship like with his classmates? Never quite one ...