With all this talk about starting a novel, I’m very pleased to bring Peggy Riley to the blog to finish my five sentences.

Peggy Riley is a writer and playwright living in Kent, and one of the reasons I was so keen to feature her is that, not only is she a fab writer you will be hearing much more of, but her website is a really useful guide to how a novel progresses step-by-step, as it were. Peggy also blogs well about what she reads, what she learns, and how she’s writing, with Scrivener. It is very much a writer’s blog, and in previous lives she has been a bookseller, writer-in-residence at a young offender prison, and a festival producer.

Now she runs workshops for writers (with Betty Herbert) through Hope & Anchor Writing” with some particularly interesting webinars coming up.

AND… her first novel, Amity and Sorrow, was bought by Little Brown just before Christmas and will be published in 2013. Or at least, I think Peggy wrote it. Here’s her cat looking as if there’s something we ought to know…

So, anyway, Peggy … answer my sentences please.

When you were small, you wanted to … be a writer. I clearly lack ambition, as I never went through a astronaut or supermodel or president phase. Or maybe I’m just stubborn.

The one thing you can never resist is … red licorice. It isn’t even licorice, really, but I adore it. I scour American cities to find it. But it must be Red Vines. It cannot be the more readily available Twizzlers. Those will not do.

You may not say it aloud but… I believe the universe is a kind and just place, by and large. It is hard to believe it every day, in the light of the horrors around us, and a kind and just universe does not presuppose that all of its inhabitants will be similarly kind and just, but the alternative is too grim to contemplate.

The last time you went ‘WOOP’ with excitement was … during a phone call from my new agent, me with a houseful of writers to see a performance poetry event in my living room, with her very welcome words – we’ve sold your book. “Amity and Sorrow” will be published by Little, Brown in spring 2013 and I couldn’t be more thrilled.

Your five favourite words are ….
knuckle
heliotrope
rareripe
crinoline
splay

Thank you, Peggy! Here’s hoping your book makes a huuugggeee impact…

Other Five Sentences …

* With Anthony McGowan
* With Tania Hershman
* With Abegail Morley.
* With John Siddique.
* With Clare Best.
* With Scott Pack.
* With Jonathan Pinnock.