Busy doesn’t even begin to describe the last few weeks. The launch of The Valley of Ravens in Hay Castle was a wonderful experience and I’m pleased to say a sell out ticket wise. We even had the Welsh flag flying over the castle to honour  Llewelyn, the book’s medieval hero. I have signed so many books since then I have succumbed to writers’ cramp but it has been an absolute joy meeting so many of my readers. My travels up and down the Welsh-English border   echoed the theme of the book and I was constantly recognising sites of battles and treaties from places in the story, sadly in some places made more dramatic by the sight of smoke rising from the wild fires on the mountainsides in the distance. In Mold we postponed  our event in the library for an hour to enable us all to watch the eclipse. In the end the sun played shy and swathed itself in thick black cloud, but we did sample a little of the strangely eery twilight which I remembered from the total eclipse last time  round. It wasn’t quite so dramatic this time, but enough for cars to switch on their headlights and the pigeons on the rooftops to go quiet.

So now, at last all the excitement is nearly over and I can go back to those pages of notes for the next novel – pages which I may say have quietly proliferated since I last mentioned them here in my news entries. A few more days of the holidays ( and some joyous celebrations of some successful GCSE results for  my eldest grandson), and then it’s back to my desk for real.