Katherine Roberts

Tower Hamlets shortlist 2013 Muse: Tell me, Katherine, now that Sword of Light is on the Tower Hamlets shortlist... what do you feel about awards? Katherine: To me, it's a strange mix of delight that someone somewhere has actually read my book and enjoyed it enough to nominate it for an award, coupled with anxiety that, having been catapulted into the public eye, my book will fail (that is, I will fail, because I wrote it) . And then everyone will laugh at me, my publisher will be disappointed, and I will never get another contract EVER, as long as I live... ( Muse: this is a common author whine - best to ignore her. ) Awards get books and their authors noticed, so I guess publishers quite like them. But there is not much I can do to help Sword of Light now, because I wrote it more than a year ago and my creative input stopped the moment my publisher launched it into the world. I suppose I feel a bit like a parent, watching their child perform on stage - willing my boo...

What has the Unicorn been up to this summer? Well, the Grail of Stars needed some final editing tweaks before publication, the sun finally came out just as we finished them, and then my author disappeared! Turns out she has been to a secret author conference in deepest Oxfordshire, where they do all kinds of authorly things such as five minute readings from work in progress, discussing celebrity series (many of them ghost-written by real authors), drawing pictures with the opposite hand while blindfolded, eating too many puddings, drama workshops, comparing sales figures, finding out more about ebooks, eating more puddings, collecting tips for travelling with books, and - to work off some of the puddings - yoga. To prove she has been "working", here are some pictures she took and a poem she wrote at a Writing the Tarot workshop led by Jenny Alexander (who blogs in the House of  Dreams , if you want to know more). Katherine's random major arcana card - "The Wor...