April already, and the ticking of deadlines grows ever louder ...  But I am one down, three to go for the year, so things could be worse.  Almost one down, anyway.  One doesn’t want to count one’s chickens before they are fully hatched;  I sent off my completed manuscript on Wednesday night and am waiting to hear back from my editor if she wants any revisions.  Hopefully she won’t want me to do anything major to it (all digits crossed)  which means I should now get cracking with the 30,000 word story that has to be in by the middle of May.

I’ve just been writing a rough (a very rough) outline, full of maybes and questions to myself, for that.  The story has had a slow but rather typical gestation, starting out in London with lunch with my editor, followed by a long tube journey with my friend, Diana, who has been having her plotting ideas dismissed for nearly twenty years now.&a ...

Thanks to Jane, Donna and Melissa, who all commented on the last blog, I’m back again (and not sure whether to thank them or to think … darn it!)  I’ve been in London, where I had a very nice lunch with my lovely editor, followed by martinis at the Goring Hotel … absolutely fabulous and after three the world was looking a much better place, I can tell you, although I nearly passed out when I saw the bill!  They were delicious though, so I really think one of heroines will have to be taken for a drink there one of these days – it’s what research is all about.

 I couldn’t wait to  leave London when I lived there, but I really enjoy going back now, and the city was looking its best in the spring sunshine.  The only problem with London is how big it is, and how far you have to walk – and the fact that I have never been able to  find comfortable shoes ...

Here I am, back staring at a blank screen and pondering the nature and benefits of blogging.  Blogs are like mobile phones or computers … it hardly seems any time since they were a kind of specialised interest – you knew what it was, sort of,  but it wasn’t anything to do with you – and suddenly they’re everywhere and you wonder: when did that happen? 

The first time I came across a computer was when I worked for Operation Raleigh in the 1980s, and it took up a whole room.  Now it’s hard to imagine life without them.  I wrote my first few books on an electric typewriter, endlessly Tippexing and altering page numbers, but eventually inherited my brother’s Amstrad, which changed my life.  I’m always very resistant to new technology and then adapt with the fervour of a new convert the moment I succumb (usually about five years after everyone else has ...

In the end I managed 42 pages of an initial draft – phew!  I feel quite happy with the story line, and think I can see how it’s all going to work. The trouble is that once I’ve got over the panic of what the story is going to be, it feels in my head as if I’ve already done it, and I can’t be bothered with writing it all out!  But there’s only one way to get the story from my head onto the page, and that’s writing …

Now comes the hard graft of bulking it out and making the characters and their emotions come to life.  I find it very hard to concentrate at this stage, and have been endlessly distracted over the last couple of days by visiting Liz Fielding and Natasha Oakley, who’ve been blogging on eHarlequin, and attending the Pink Heart Society Party.  Much time was wasted trying to register at Yahoo and eHarlequin, and I got thoroughly confused about what ...

In spite of spending the last two weeks telling myself that today is the day I am going to sit down and start writing, I have only managed five pages of rough notes so far.  It’s extraordinary how much time I can waste doing anything other than sit down at my computer and write.   Actually getting to the computer isn’t too much of a problem; it’s the opportunities for procrastination that it offers, especially now that I have broadband.  I have never been one for surfing the internet, but as soon as Chapter 1 beckons, there I am, Googling like mad on the tenuous grounds that it is really “research”. 

I’ve decided to open the book with my hero and heroine meeting on a leadership development course.  There’s not much call for leadership development when you’re an author, but I have plenty of friends who seem to spend their whole time being sent on these courses.  One was very miffed to find that on some psychometric tes ...

Well, here I am, blogging for the first time, but the truth is that I’ve nothing exciting to report, so don’t hold your breath.  Like everyone else I’ve spent the last few weeks preparing for/recovering from Christmas and New Year.  I had a sad start to the festive season as I had to have the last of my beloved tabbies put to sleep just before Christmas, and Mungo had a dire prognosis at the same time, but he at least seems to be on the mend now.  I spent Christmas in Scotland, and New Year in Wiltshire. 

Most New Year’s Eve was spent on an obstacle course in the dark in the pouring rain ... which I sincerely hope is not an omen for the year to come, although it’s a pretty good metaphor for last year.  Oddly, as you can see from the photo I appear to be smiling, ...

Oh, dear, I have been very, very slack about updating this diary. I can’t believe I last did it in May … whatever happened to June and July??? I have been drifting lazily through summer, loving the sunshine but finding it almost impossible to do any work. In fact, when I look back at the last two months, it’s hard to know what I’ve been doing. I did write a very rough draft of the next two books when I was away in June, and the plan was that I would set to and write a proper draft of the first one when I got back to my computer in July.

But first I had to go the Romantic Novelists’ Association Conference in Penrith, where I had rashly promised to give a talk. Since I didn’t feel able to talk about anything useful, like how to give your novel pace (the original request) – I don’t know how I write - I ended up giving a tongue-in-cheek guide to survival for romantic novelists, which would have been fine except for the fact that I decided to have some visuals to go with my talk and s ...

Well, the roses have faded and have had to be thrown out, but the bowl and the glow are still there, much aided by not having to do any revisions at all on the last manuscript. If this goes on, I will begin to think that maybe I can write romance after all …

I’m now in the blissful position of having no deadline until the end of October … it feels wonderful! I have to keep reminding myself that I can’t afford to relax too much, as there is very little of the summer unaccounted for, and the October deadline will swiftly be followed by one at the end of November, which effectively means writing the two books together. This is to be a duet, two linked books, and my brief was that one should be set in outback Australia and one in London. For a long time, that was all I had, but then I went out for a drink with the two friends who constitute my City Screen plotting team, and that was all it took for the ideas to start flowing. I’m not one of those who believes that writing ...

What a difference a month (and a prize!) makes, eh? I can safely say that I’m enjoying being a romantic novelist again now, so let’s just ignore my gloom in March!

I struggled to the end of my manuscript just before Easter (phew!), and then was delighted to go away for a couple of weeks and forget about it. I had a lovely time in Scotland, and then back down in Wiltshire, and then, of course, it was April 20th and I had to get myself to the Savoy in London. I had to get up very early that morning, with much grumbling about not wanting to go ( I won’t know anyone/no one will want to talk to me/I hate wearing tights etc etc, the usual pathetic stuff that I should have grown out of, ooh, about forty years ago) but I made it to the train on time. My heels were so high that I could only totter a few yards in them, so I had to wear my ugly, but extremely comfortable, drongo sandals ( not a good look) until I made it to the National Gallery where I was meeting a friend for coffee and ...