After a break of several months I’m back into murder mode this week.  Next week I’m back in court for a trial and this week I contributed to a new series on murder that’ll be shown in the New Year.  After spending the summer working on fantasy, this week reality came back with a bang.

Normally when I’m working I flit between journalism and fiction easily enough.  I’m used to working on both so it’s a question of what the circumstances demand and I can flick from one to the other pretty easily.  This summer however I had the luxury of writing only fiction.  The courts were on their summer recess and I had an October deadline to get my novel ready for my agent to send around publishers.  I was free to spend my days in a world of my own creation, working on my characters and my plots…all those things that you don’t get to create as a journalist.  One or two have tried but that’s not my way of doing things at all!

So I’ve been writing fiction for the past couple of months, doing the whole writer thing, sitting in my pajamas, drinking too much coffee and hardly leaving the house.  It’s quite different from what’s generally required in journalism.

But that little idyll is now at an end and the day job beckons.  Maybe one day I’ll make enough money from fiction to hang up the Press hat for good but for the moment the media is well and truly the day job.

It’s been a nice break but now I’m back to juggling.