I'm just back from this year's Cromarty Crime and Thrillers Weekend which, for anyone who's never been, is a festival dedicated to all aspects of crime literature - fiction, non-fiction, forensics, archaeology. It takes place in a beautiful C18th Scottish town on the very tip of the Black Isle, just north of Inverness, and is always headed up by Ian Rankin, who has a home there.

Other authors this year were Lin Anderson and Lesley Kelly, along with former publisher and now literary agent, Jon Wood, who gave a workshop on getting published and finding success. Sadly, I couldn't go to that as it clashed with my own talk on the perks and problems of researching and writing historical crime fiction. (To be honest, it's all perks - how else would I get to have trips to lovely places just so I could wander round them taking notes and making up stories? What's not to like?)

Key themes that came from the talks and the full panel discussion at the end were: how to keep a character fresh in a long-running series; whether the police procedural has a future in a time of changes in policing and changes in reading tastes (the answer to both these seems to be to focus on an engaging character, because if you have an engaging character, readers will want to follow them; the degree to which luck is an element in writing success (Get Lucky, Stay Lucky is Mr R's advice). I concur, and would add that not giving up increases your chances of getting lucky - after a year and a half and twelve rejections from agents and publishers, I finally got lucky with my first book.

I can't emphasise enough what an enjoyable little festival this is, and how magical the location. I've been as a fan girl/reader as well as an author. One memorable event a few years ago was hearing Anne Cleaves speak engagingly for an hour from the dock of the perfectly preserved C18th Cromarty Courthouse.

Finding a favourite part of this year's festival is tricky - but possibly it was encountering the hapless Fintan. Fintan emerged more or less on the spot in the workshop I was leading on creating engaging characters, and had us all, almost instantly, in stitches. I predict great things for him. I have yet to come away from a workshop without wanting to know what happened in the stories that have emerged from them.


It's always good to get home after being away for work, but I felt a little sad leaving Cromarty, and have already made plans to take myself back to the house run by the Cromarty Arts Trust for a writer's retreat when I begin the book after the one I'm working on now.

Here endeth my very first blog post.