Last year was a busy one: several talks with other Silver Crow authors, creative writing workshops with my fellow Stellar Scribes, Sonja Price and Jan Ellis, and appearances at a couple of literary festivals. Talks in bookshops, church halls, museums, libraries and, memorably, in a tractor shed on the only weekend last summer (or so it seemed) when it rained. And rained.

I was also writing – technically re-writing, but effectively starting again on The Price of Silence, the first DI Jeff Lincoln book. I also spent a lot of time promoting The Shame of Innocence and A Saintly Grave Disturbed, taking advantage of social media to plug away at the seemingly impossible task of getting my Wiltshire-based crime series noticed.

I was also pleased to contribute to “The Fisherton Informer” magazine, a collection of articles on the history of Salisbury. I’ve written about collecting postcards and ephemera relating to the city, about my schooldays and, most recently, about the background to The Price of Silence: two murders that happened a few days before Christmas 1986.

Yet when I finished The Price of Silence and dispatched it to be evaluated, I found it hard to get down to the next, fourth, Jeff Lincoln book, even though I’d started it eighteen months ago, before I was invited to write the novella A Saintly Grave Disturbed. It was like returning to a painting that’s been abandoned partway through, the figures outlined, some of the background sketched in but not quite enough.

The last few weeks, then, I’ve felt a bit idle, catching up on scanning photographs and postcards, weeding my bookshelves, and generally Not Doing Very Much. Now it’s time to get back into that fourth Jeff Lincoln book. No more procrastination!