Katherine Roberts

WPA packhorse librarians, Kentucky, 1935-ish (image: public domain )   This year, we've all come to appreciate what is essential to our lives - and it's not always what the government thinks. Yes, we all need food, and sometimes we need medicine. But books are also essential items in my view, and so are libraries - without my local library, I might never have become a reader or a writer, and my world would be much smaller. You can travel through the pages of a book, as well as learn things Google can't tell you. Another essential part of my childhood was the local riding stable, where I spent my weekends helping in the yard in return for rides, and horses have been an important part of my life ever since. The two activities work well together: one outdoors and active with an element of risk, the other indoors and involving sitting for long periods, if fairly risk-free. Usually, I manage to combine these two passions in the pages of my books. I am the Great Horse , for exam

November is never exactly fun, and this year we have a second lockdown to make it hardly worth the 30 days on a calendar. My writing room calendar has a rather weary-looking unicorn making its slow way through the stars, and I feel much the same myself.  Seems the best method of escape this month is through the pages of a book, which can whisk you through the back of a wardrobe into Narnia, out to the stars, back in time to ancient Rome, into the future, or into someone else's head. In a book, you can be a hero or a heroine, ride a horse over the mountains, fly on a dragon's back, win all your battles, and eat cake even if all the cafes are shut.  And if - the unicorn forbid - you run out of books to read, why not write your own? Because, with perfect timing for lockdown-take-two, it's National Novel Writing Month! Or, for those in the know, NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month began in 1999 as a daunting but straightforward challenge: to write 50,000 words of a novel du