Silent Fear sneak peek!

Fancy an early peek at the first chapter of my new book? Zip on over to the Varuna website and you can hear me read it to you! This is part of Varuna's brilliant 'Writer-a-day' programme which will be launched as an iTunes app early next year. Sign up and you'll receive a message from a writer each day on your iPhone/iPad/Android phone/computer. What a way to start your morning, listening to a writer read to you from their work!

Speaking of Silent Fear, I finished the copy-edit last week and my editor, the lovely Bri at Pan Macmillan, is winding up her final checks now. It's off to the typesetters next, then will come back here, properly set out, at the end of the month. Then we read through it again, checking for any final small tweaks that need to be done, although hopefully the problems are by now limited to typos. Then back it goes again, and next time I see it it will be bound in a black and white cover as a proof. This is what goes out to bookshops and media so booksellers and reviewers can read it before it's actually released in February. Meantime here I'm hard at work on book 6, and keen to find out what's going to happen to Ella this time around!

I spent last weekend at the Brisbane Writers Festival and had enormous fun. Meeting fellow crime writers Neil Cross, Nicole Watson and Jennifer Rowe was wonderful - I don't think I've ever met a crime author I didn't like. The panels went really well, too. I got to sit in on a couple of others - one was a conversation with my friend Kate Morton, the other with the brilliant Kate Grenville. I was fortunate enough to meet Kate Grenville beforehand in the writers' green room, and we spoke for a couple of minutes and she signed my much-loved copy of Dark Places and a copy of her new book Sarah Thornhill. I've been a fan of her work for years now and never met her (though I have sent her fan letters), so to finally get to say hello in person was something special.

Holidays next week! We're off to Tasmania for a much-anticipated break. Cross your fingers we get good weather!

cheers,
Katherine.