This month’s blog is full of excitement!

First of all, I’m delighted (and only a bit nervous) to announce that I will be having my first public event at Waterstones Oxford on Thursday 18th September at 4:30pm. I’ll be talking about who I am, why I wrote Murder Most Unladylike and why mysteries are such extremely interesting things, and I’d love to see you there. If you’re really nice to me I might even let you try on my Sherlock Holmes hat.

Second, the UKYA Blogger Awards are taking place this month. Some very nice people have nominated me in some of the categories – I’m up for Most Social Author (offline), Best First Line, Best Mystery and Best Friendship. Anyone can vote, and voting will stay open until the 21st September. Please do vote (although don’t feel you have to vote for me) – there are so many fantastic authors on the shortlists, and they all deserve recognition.

I’ve also been blogging up a storm on other websites in recent weeks:

Here I am at Author Allsorts, writing about some of the books that made me a reader.

And here I am at Girls Heart Books, in my very first post for them, talking about how important friendship is to both boarding school pupils and detectives.

For anyone following the progress of Arsenic for Tea, I’m pleased to say that the text has now been finalised, and it’s gone off to be turned into a book-shaped thing. I’ll only see the script once more before it’s actually published (which will be in January 2015, in case you’re interested – it’s already available for pre-order on Amazon, Waterstones and Blackwell’s).

If you’d like to know more about Daisy and Hazel’s second adventure, here’s a blog post I wrote last month introducing you to it.

And if you just can’t wait until January to read more, you’re in luck: I’ve been given the go-ahead to reveal a very special and very exclusive extract from it on this website very soon. Keep checking back here, and follow me on Twitter, if you want to make sure not to miss it!

I’m now busily working away on the first draft of Book 3, which is currently called First Class Murder, and currently features Daisy and Hazel travelling across Europe on a very special and very famous train. As is the way with first drafts, nothing makes much sense at the moment, but I have hopes that things will improve eventually. Wish me luck!