Well, the American edition of The Blooding hit the shelves on July 15th. Looking back, I can't quite believe how long it took me to write the story. Trust me, there were numerous times when I was quite prepared to press the 'delete' button and send the manuscript into that great shredder in the sky.

But if the writing was hard, researching the history of the War of 1812 was fascinating. Not much is known about the conflict and to help me with my research I took inspiration from a number of sources, one of which was the very watchable PBS (www.pbs.org) documentary. If you would like a taste of the film, here's a link to the trailer, courtesy of those very kind people at WNED TV Buffalo / Toronto: