Yesterday was National Libraries Day, and I’m pretty sure I would not have a writing career if it wasn’t for Public Libraries. As a child I had a 6 book per week habit, and there’s no way my parents could have afforded to fund that. We had books in the house, and I was certainly brought up in a reading home, but new books were definitely for birthdays and Christmases. Dundee St library was a ten minute skip from home, so I read my way round the children’s fiction shelves there before graduating to the Edinburgh Central children’s library and basically spending every Saturday morning there for the next five years.

I’m lucky enough to be able to afford to buy  most of my fiction now, preferably from my excellent local independent bookshop (The Edinburgh Bookshop), so I mainly use libraries for research. Google’s OK for a quick check of a particular fact, but if I really want to get to know about something, I would far rather stick my head in a book. Recent topics have included Cuba, the Periodic Table, wolves in the UK, eclipses and London docks…

And in this month’s writing progress report: I have recentlydelivered another science manuscript to the publisher, so looking forward to feedback on that from the editor, and I’ve just started writing a new novel. It’s at that exciting stage where I have no idea what’s going to happen next or if it’s going to work at all – I’ll keep you posted!

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