It's Friday - What Can Possibly Go Wrong?
A weekly newsletter from Jodi Taylor - 5th September 2025
This week we have:
A new live appearance with Jodi Taylor and Caimh McDonnell at The Battersea Bookshop - limited tickets available
A David Sands Writing Competition entry: The Great Alien Adventure by Jacqui Collins
This Week in History: The Great Fire of London 2nd September 1666
Jodi Taylor Book Recommendation: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson 💙📚
A joke from the #SillySunday thread in Jodi’s Fans and Readers Facebook Group
The Book of the Month is About Time by Jodi Taylor
There’s plenty to read this week and you can see everything new on the blog too. CLICK HERE for the blog.
A conversation with authors Jodi Taylor and C.K McDonnell
Get ready for an unforgettable evening of chaos, comedy, and timeline calamities as two masters of genre-bending fiction come together at The Battersea Bookshop.
Join bestselling authors Jodi Taylor (Out of Time) and C.K. McDonnell (Ring the Bells) for an in-conversation event that dives into their latest riotous, heart-pounding instalments of time travel and supernatural shenanigans.
In Out of Time, the Time Police are facing their most dangerous mission yet – and this time, the past has come to them. From rogue St Mary's historians to prehistoric corpses, royal conspiracies, and an ominous malfunction in the very fabric of time, this mission is a race against the clock with the fate of history hanging in the balance.
Meanwhile, over in Manchester, the Stranger Times team is having their own not-so-merry crisis in Ring the Bells. What starts as a routine book club ends in triple homicide – and that’s before a librarian becomes possessed by a vengeful, other-dimensional being bent on humanity’s destruction. Throw in demon Santas, haunted nightclubs, and a family reunion from hell, and it’s safe to say Christmas is well and truly cancelled.
Expect laughter, behind-the-scenes secrets, and a few surprises as Jodi and C.K. chat about the art of storytelling, character chaos, and why saving the world (or destroying it) is never as simple as it sounds.
Books will be available to purchase and have signed on the night.
About the speakers:
Jodi Taylor is the internationally bestselling author of the Chronicles of St Mary's series, the story of a bunch of disaster prone individuals who investigate major historical events in contemporary time. Do NOT call it time travel! She is also the author of the Time Police series - a St Mary's spinoff. Born in Bristol and now living in Gloucester, she spent many years with her head somewhere else before finally deciding to put all that daydreaming to good use and write a novel. Over twenty books later, she still has no idea what she wants to do when she grows up.
C K McDonnell is a former stand-up comedian and TV writer. He has performed all around the world, had several well-received Edinburgh shows and supported acts such as Sarah Millican on tour before hanging up his clowning shoes to concentrate on writing.
He has also written for numerous TV shows and been nominated for a BAFTA. He is the author of the bestselling Stranger Times series.
Doors will open at 6.30pm Talk starts 7.00pm
Special offer - 15% off any book purchased on the evening.
The Great Alien Adventure by Jacqui Collins
The Great Alien Adventure started out with Rosie taking Monday off work, to take me to the hospital. My foot had started itching - not normally a problem, but when you have a bionic foot… well, that’s not normal. My doctor wanted to see me as soon as I called him, taking phantom limb pain seriously. Rosie and I don’t often get to do things together during the week, so after the appointment we had lunch at a country pub. Rosie spent a full hour telling me everything she was sick of this month, from annoying effing academics to effing annoying filing, but eventually she ground to a halt and asked me how the appointment went. The doctor had said there was no obvious reason for the itching, suggested it was maybe a spot of unusual electrical activity in the bionic circuitry, and gave me antihistamines just in case. I made a mental note to call in for a foot service, even though it hadn’t been long since the last one.
Rosie didn’t take this lack of resolution very well. She is a very - shall we say, passionate? kind of a person. Her boss often says that I am extremely lucky that she loves me, as it’s very clear that I wouldn’t survive five minutes if she didn’t. Bit of a force of nature, our Rosie Lee.
We - the three of us: me, Rosie, and her teenaged son - live in Rushford, where Benjamin goes to school. Rather agreeably, he had just gone on a week-long school residential trip, leaving the previous evening. It was just me and her together today, with the whole lazy afternoon stretching ahead of us. If only I could get her to stop ranting and come home with me, we might have a nice leisurely nap. Everyone likes a lovely afternoon nap, don’t they? But no. Rosie was in full flood. It was ‘terrible’ how my poor missing foot made me a guinea pig for the latest crackpot contraptions, it was ‘horrible’ how I had lost my foot in the first place, it was even ‘awful’ that she hadn’t been allowed in the hospital room with me and my consultant that morning. That was no accident. She had previously terrified the poor man so much that he could barely speak, which isn’t what you want or need from a medical professional. It was during this part of the conversation that my foot stopped itching and started beeping.
We both fell silent, her open-mouthed, mid-sentence, and me with a chip halfway into my gob. It fell out onto the table when my foot beeped a second time. Rosie gave me a Hard Stare. I quickly picked up the chip, but the Stare continued.
This Week in History: The Great Fire of London: A Catastrophe that Shaped a City
In September 1666, a devastating inferno swept through the heart of London, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. The Great Fire of London, as it came to be known, razed homes, businesses, and landmarks, engulfing the city in flames for days. This catastrophic event not only reshaped the physical landscape of London but also created urban planning and fire safety measures that would influence cities around the world for centuries to come.
By the mid-17th century, London was a bustling metropolis, its narrow streets and timber-framed buildings packed tightly together. Many of these structures were highly susceptible to fire, and the city's crowded and haphazard layout only exacerbated the risk. On the evening of September 2, 1666, a small fire broke out in the bakery of Thomas Farriner on Pudding Lane, sparking a chain of events that would engulf the city in flames.
Jodi Taylor Book Recommendation: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson 💙📚
In this remarkably prescient modern classic, Neal Stephenson explores
linguistics, computer science, politics and philosophy in the form of a break-neck adventure into the fast-approaching yet eerily recognizable future.
Have you enjoyed this book too?
A joke from the #SillySunday thread in Jodi’s Fans and Readers Facebook Group
This week’s joke is from Julie Cox:
Overheard at the local surgery
"Doctor, Doctor - I keep thinking I'm an Hotel"
"OK May I examine you?"
"Be my guest"
The Book of the Month is About Time
This is the fourth book in the Time Police series and for reasons which now escape me, I thought it would be a good idea to cram all the action into one 24-hour period.
[I do sometimes wonder about my thought processes]
Anyway, I threw everything at everyone in this book. Jane’s family trauma – her grandmother – the breakup of Team 236 – America – the unbelievable but unbeatable team of Max and Varma – Callen – everything happens in this one. Great fun to write but complicated. I had charts, diagrams, timelines, major plot points and bits of dialogue scribbled all over the walls and scattered across the floor. And there were a great many sleepless nights as I wrestled with resolving enough issues to satisfy my readers while also making it very clear there was a lot more still to come. I definitely had a few Max moments during this one. You know – those moments when she wonders why on earth she didn’t take that nice job at the abattoir.
It was done eventually and I was quite pleased with it. I did enjoy writing Jane’s horrible grandmother and suggesting she was a truly unpleasant person without going overboard about it. The best bit, though, was trying to calculate how long it would take someone to hit the ground when thrown out of a helicopter.
Many of you will have noticed that maths is not my strong point. I always put it like that because it implies I do actually have strong points, which according to my family is debatable.
I am aware of the thirty feet per second per second thingy, although how to apply it was well beyond my simple abilities. The whole story is told in the Author’s Note at the end of the book but once again I’d like to thank Messrs Hammond, Clarkson and May for their practical advice concerning caravans, helicopters and the dropping of one from the other.
My careful research however was rubbished by Headline who apparently have proper mathematicians, who, presumably, have nothing better to do than criticise their author’s erratic calculations. At this point I should say that their version was nowhere near as dramatic as mine but eventually I merged the two theories – so the ending manages to be both exciting and inaccurate. Which is quite a feat.
Enjoy …
Awesome book. Introduced us to the concept of burbclaves , which are rapidly becoming a Thing. And we love the idea of a psychopath riding around on a bike with a nuke in his sidecar, and 'Poor Impulse Control' tattooed on his forehead.
What could possibly go wrong?