It’s been quite a week! First,  I met up with Liz Gordon from Brilliant Fish PR & Marketing Ltd at the splendid Woodbury Park Hotel.   Then on Thursday, I was part of a London Writers Club event – Write with a Literary Agent – hosted by Jacq Burns.   Along with fellow participants Kate and Lynne, I was able to ask Jacq how to make my writing stand out more.  No easy task, but at least she gave us plenty of pointers.  There is such competition out there, we need to make it very clear to potential agents why our book has ‘The X Factor’.

It was great, too, to catch up with Lynne, who writes as Lynne E Blackwood and is working on a crime novel set in the Republic of Georgia – very topical!   We were friends at school, losing touch until about ten years ago when she came back to England after many years away.

So…  Now I need to get back into The Shame of Innocence and give it a general overhaul, thanks to Jacq’s suggestions.  It all comes back to giving the crime a stronger setting, constructing more solidly the closed community so important to thrillers.  It’s all so obvious but I suppose when you are close up to a project, the obvious isn’t always quite in focus!!