Online travels including Trafalgar and coffee mugs

It occurs to me that I read more and more interesting things online these days, and not just the news from the BBC website.

There's an interesting interview with Alexander McCall Smith at Bookslut. 'People invest such significance in the small things,' says McCall Smith. 'For example, in my Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld is always worried about someone using his room while he’s away. That’s actually a very common human fear, worrying about people using our coffee mug or something.'
It set some thoughts in motion about a character I'm developing.

Fenella-Jane Miller, whose first Regency romantic adventure is out this month with Hale, has a really nice website which I perused earlier this week. The book blurb for The Unconventional Miss Walters begins, Eleanor Walters is obliged, by the terms of her Aunt's will, to marry a man she cordially dislikes... I'm looking forward to reading it.

One pleasure for Sundays in particular is catching up with Anne Weale's weekly column on her Bookworm on the Net blog. Anne Weale is so well informed and always writes something which is thought-provoking. This week she asks why a publisher promoting a charity campaigning to end violence against women should in the same breath be re-issuing a book which contains repeated rape.

On a lighter note, I was diverted for five minutes with the opportunity to win two tickets to the awards for Romantic Novel of the Year at London's famous Savoy hotel by taking part in the very easy RNA poll.

And finally, it's the big Trafalgar anniversary this weekend and I've certainly been reading much more about it online than in newspapers and magazines. I think if it wasn't for having something to read on the train I wouldn't buy newspapers any more.