Some lovely projects have come my way of late. Creative Tourist launched in July 2009, picked up two prizes at the Big Chip Awards in 2010 - one of which was for best online brand - and this autumn won a Manchester Tourism Marketing Campaign Award. This digital arts magazine and associated city guides is part of an ongoing tourism communications project I have developed for Manchester Museums Consortium, eight museums and galleries that includes Manchester Art Gallery, The Lowry, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Imperial War Museum North, Cornerhouse and the People’s History Museum. As well as developing the strategy behind the project, I also co-edit the magazine with Kate Feld.

Onto other projects. I am currently working with the art photographer Alexandra Wolkowicz on a new creative project, Forsaken Identity. Inspired by a quote from the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, the project fuses real-life stories with fiction and photography and, ultimately, aims to create a new work of art that reveals the untruths that punctuate everyday life. Wondering what on earth I’m going on about? Read more about Forsaken Identity here.

Other creative news: my novel, Mother’s Beloved, won the Crocus First Chapter Competition (and the subsequent Is There A Novelist in the House? event that formed part of the 2010 Manchester Literature Festival). I am now working with a literary agency to get the novel up to publishing standard. On top of that, I’m also working on a new book called Thirteen to the Dozen. A scrapbook of a childhood spent helping out in my Dad’s bakery, the book documents a road trip Dad and I take to find some of the last remaining British craft bakeries. A website and more details will follow soon.

Elsewhere, I have just begun work for the National Trust on a new guidebook for their Cheshire-based property, Dunham Massey. The book will be out in early 2012. The new Time Out guidebook to Manchester, which I edited, hit the shelves late last year. And finally, but perhaps most importantly, I’ve just had a baby. Isobel Grace was born in March and is, of course, utterly, utterly fabulous.