Mo Fanning – My writing life

It’s tough not drinking in a society where alcohol rules. Especially during lockdown. Every Friday Zoom meeting ends with someone saying how much they can’t wait to pour a gin and switch off.

I’ve lived through panic buying loo roll, tinned tomatoes and dried pasta, cut my own hair badly and refused to rattle saucepans as the NHS re-appropriated my rainbow.

Mo Fanning looks back at 2020 - a year of reading, writing and anything but the bloody pandemic. Take a moment to join him.

Remember 2019? The worst year ever. Putting politics to one side, it was one of those years that took away too many beloved famous faces. On 31 December 2019, many breathed a sigh of relief and looked forward to something better.

I spent my Manchester years stumbling from one bar and bed to another. If I'd written only of familiar things, my debut novel would have told a very different story.

I can’t be the only writer unsure how (or if) to deal with an unpredictable global pandemic. COVID-19 didn’t exist when I started work on my upcoming novel - and given a whole chunk of the action hangs off events at a seaside cafe, I could have done without it hitting.

Writer's block is painful. Everyone gets a form of it at some point, and most writers have ways of dealing with it. A frequent fix is to 'just write anything' until the feeling of being blocked passes.

With (hopefully final) edits well underway on what will become my next romantic comedy novel - Rebuilding Alexandra Small -...

My mother died in February. At the time, the virus that now traps us in our homes was little more...

How’s your lockdown going? I’m borderline depressed. So I don’t plan on ending my lockdown life ... or doing anything...