Author Archives: Lorna

Self-Publishing or Traditional Publishing – Which is Best?

10th December 2018 by Lorna
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Rural reading

To self-publish or to seek an agent and a publisher? Which is the best route? It’s a question that many writers, myself included, often ask and I’m going to attempt to answer it.

I self-published my first three books. I hadn’t planned to write a trilogy but that’s how it worked out. They focused on farming, using tongue-in-cheek humour to reflect on farming life past and present. All are non-fiction. I didn’t try to find a publisher. I decided to self-publish [...]

Irish Boarding School Life compared to Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers

27th November 2018 by Lorna
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My much loved copies of Malory Towers

This time last year, my editor and formatter Sally Vince was putting the finishing touches to the book I had just finished, a social history of the Collegiate School Celbridge. The all-girls school had merged with the boys’ school Kilkenny  College in 1973 (where I went to secondary school in the 1980s as it happened) and past pupil, teacher and headmistress Miss Freda Yates, now in her 90s, had been looking for someone to write a book about [...]

The Joy of Ambling – for Humans and Cows

5th November 2018 by Lorna
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Cows ambling along an Irish country lane

Do people amble and relax and meander as much as they used to? Do we meander and daydream and stare into space as much as we should? Mobile phones are great but they mean we are never bored, not bored enough to daydream. I know that if there’s a ten-minute wait when I’m collecting my teenagers that I spend the few minutes checking twitter or sending an email or making a phone call or reading an article. If I’m waiting for them [...]

10 Reasons Why Farmers Make Great Husbands

30th October 2018 by Lorna
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Do Farmers Make Great Husbands_

When I started writing my first book Would You Marry a Farmer? I was genuinely surprised at the number of single women who told me they really wanted to marry a farmer. Part of the reason for my surprise was because farmers definitely weren’t seen as a good catch in the 1950s when draughty farmhouses, lack of electricity and piped water, living with your mother-in-law and hard work were the norm for many. However, in the twenty-first century, farmers are [...]

It’s always good to be alive

24th October 2018 by Lorna
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Tree in Ireland at Autumn

Without wanting to sound too morose and, dare I say it, a ‘stereotypically grumpy farmer’, it has been a tough year for farmers this year. Between the late, very wet, very cold spring which meant winter extended into May, and then a drought during the summer, it’s been a year that involved a lot of extra work as we were still doing winter work for weeks during the heatwave. Without even thinking about the bank balance, a lot of farmers [...]