Remember me?  Long time, no blog, I know.  It feels like a lot longer than a month since the party, but the balloons have yet to go down and are currently decorating my shed while I wait for them to deflate as I can’t quite bring myself to pop them.  I was hoping this might be symbolic, but given that I have been horribly, horribly blocked on the writing front ever since, I have had to conclude that maybe not!   I have just restarted this book for the sixth time.  The heroine’s name has changed four times, and is now back to the original (Cassie), the hero’s twice.  These are not good signs!  I closed down, shut myself away and had an excruciating week when I wrote four thousand words a day, knowing that it was all useless, but unable to think of anything else to do.  It was like trying to run waist-deep in mud.  Ugh.

The problem, I eventually realised, was that I had too much plot. When I was in San Francisco, I went to Blake Snyder’s talk about writing screenplays which was not just entertaining but really stimulating.  I loved the parallels between screenwriting and writing romance, and went straight out to buy his book, Save the Cat!  The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need.  Last week, when I hit rock bottom, I went back to it.  One of the points Blake makes in the book is the need to fulfil the ‘promise of the premise’ and it hit me that was precisely what my story wasn’t doing.  I was getting bogged down in the back story instead of focusing on the fun part of the story (the mock engagement), or what Blake calls ‘fun and games’.  Once I realised that, I went back to change my heroine completely, cut half the plot and the five chapters I’d already written (aarrgh) and started again.  And you know what?  In spite of still having nine and a half chapters to write, it feels a million times better.  Now it’s a Jessica Hart and I know what I’m doing.  Phew.

After all the hoo-hah with the 50/50 celebrations, things have been rather quiet otherwise, although I have just had the hardback editions of my next book, Cinderella’s Wedding Wish.  What do you think of the cover?    In spite of having an office setting, the hero and heroine appear to be in Buckingham Palace, but I can sort of see what they were thinking.  The shoe thing is quite clever, I think, playing up the fairy-tale element in the title, and presumably that’s what the palace is about too.  Shame the hero looks like a chipmunk, though.  I can assure you, Rafe is gorgeous in reality!

There’ll be more about Cinderella’s Wedding Wish later, and I’ll be offering an advance copy of as prize in a special Christmas contest, so check back in December for details of that.  First, though, I need to announce the winners of the last contest.  Monique Wood was the first name out of the hat, so she’ll be having a character named after her in the Pick Your Own book which I’ll be writing next.  And look out for an Anne, too, as Anne Lane suggested a hero’s name that I haven’t considered before but quite like: Bryn.  Many thanks to everyone else who took part – I feel sure all the names you suggested have lodged in my subconscious and will pop up sooner or later, so if you come across one of yours in future, you’ll be able to feel a proprietorial interest!

Right, back to those nine and a half chapters ….