Hhmmnn.  There I was feeling very pleased with myself – verging, indeed, on the insufferably smug – having got to the end of a full draft last night, with still a whole month before my deadline. How quickly things can change!  I’ve been enjoying writing this book, too.  It’s a romantic comedy, based on the Pick Your Own Romance survey I ran here last year as part of the 50 book celebrations, and writing it in the first person made it feel a lot fresher for me.  So I’ve been rattling away, not bothering with too many articles or inverted commas, and telling myself that the final draft would just need a bit of polishing and punctuation. 

WRONG! 

I sat down this evening and reread the entire draft and it’s obviously going to require much more work than I’d thought.  So much for ducking the usual Chapter 7 crisis!  I don’t know why I’m surprised.  Only last night I was telling my friend Stella that I was bound to decide that the whole story needed rewriting once I read it, but I wanted to be wrong about THAT, not my comfortable punctuation and polish scenario.   In all fairness, things could be a lot worse.  It’s not ALL bad and I’m hoping that once I go back to the beginning it will all come together, but time has a nasty habit of speeding up the closer a deadline approaches, and there’s Easter to take into account as well, so I’d better get on with it tomorrow.

I’ve been such a good girl recently that there’s not much else new.  My one excursion last week was to see “Duplicity” – I couldn’t follow the plot at all, but Clive Owen was very easy on the eye, and I’ve ordered the soundtrack on a whim in the hope that it’ll make good writing music.  We’ll see.  I’ve been listening to Dido mainly while writing this book, with an evening or two of Miriam Makeba while I was writing the Cameroon scenes.  The story is mostly set in London (an office setting came top in the PYO survey) but for various reasons I wanted my hero and heroine to spend a little time in Africa, so I sent them on a trip to Cameroon, where I spent five months on expedition with Operation Raleigh twenty years ago.  I was based in the headquarters, but I did get to do a few trips, including paddling down the Cross and Munaya rivers.  To my embarrassment, I realised when I looked at my photos that I remember very little about that particular trip, but I DO recall stopping at the village here in the photo, and being invited to drink palm wine in an immaculately clean hut, so that’s the one I’ve used in my story. 

A quick contest:  a copy of my June book, HONEYMOON WITH THE BOSS, to anyone who can tell me which of my earlier books was set in Cameroon.  (There's a tiny hint from the webmistress here and here).  Email your answer to me to be in with a chance to win.

I had a very nostalgic time looking at my photos of Cameroon, and remembering what a fantastic year 1989 was.  After Cameroon, I went to Algeria for three months, came home to get a job as foreign newsdesk secretary at The Observer and had my first book accepted by Mills & Boon in December that year, so 2009 marks my twentieth anniversary with HM&B.  I had the letter (remember those?) on 23rd December 1989 – that was a very good Christmas!  I thought I was celebrated out after last year, but already I’m beginning to wonder whether a 20th anniversary celebration might be in order come December …

I’ve sent a couple of extra pictures of Cameroon for the Where are you? page.  Last time I counted, there were 79 countries registered, so I’m hanging out for number 80!  If you haven’t dropped by there for a while, do have a look.  There are some new photos there too, from readers as far apart as Oregon and Budapest, and Natasha Oakley  and Trish Wylie had a trip to Rome recently (a blast, I imagine!) and sent me a picture of A Whirlwind Engagement by the Trevi fountain in Rome – huge thanks to all.  Thank you, too, to everyone who sent such kind messages about the RITA® nomination for Last-Minute Proposal – I’ve been really touched by them all. 

And now I really don’t think I can put it off any longer … it’s back to Chapter One!