I looked at this card a lot last summer!  It has been stuck up above my computer for years, and I was writing Honeymoon with the Boss while outside it was as grey and miserable as only an English summer can be.  The story is set in the Maldives, so whenever I was short of inspiration (quite a lot of the time, as it turned out), all I had to do was glance up.  My scanner isn’t very good, and puts dirty yellow dots all over everything, but the original card is beautiful, and always makes me feel as if I’m wallowing in a lagoon, digging my fingers into the white sand and listening to the hot wind soughing through the coconut palms (my toes are curling just thinking about it!) 

Honeymoon with the Boss kicks off a new sub-series called Escape Around the World, and anyone who’s visited the Where in the world are you? page (now with 81 flags alight) can probably guess just how I jumped at the offer to write the opening book!  I’ve always been a frustrated travel writer, so I loved being able to have my head when it came to describing the island where Imogen and Tom spend three idyllic weeks, lucky things.  Ironically, I haven’t actually been to the Maldives (not for want of dreaming) but I did some research over a bottle of wine with a friend of a friend who HAS been, and happily drew on memories of other tropical islands where I’ve lolled blissfully in the shade and never wanted to leave.  Later books in the series will take you to Sicily (Carol Grace), the Aegean (Barbara McMahon), India (Nicola Marsh), Greece (Rebecca Winters) and China (Lucy Gordon), so all you armchair travellers have a treat in store!

Like other authors, I’m often asked where I get my ideas from.  It’s not always easy to say ,but in the case of Honeymoon with the Boss,  I know exactly where the story began.  I’d been to see the film Made of Honour, which ends with the heroine leaving her groom at the altar in favour of the Patrick Dempsey character.  There were also a lot of unnecessary (and unfunny) “jokes” about an overweight bridesmaid, and I spent the whole journey home tutting about the opportunity the filmmakers had missed to make a more satisfying ending which would have left the bridesmaid and the rejected groom happy as well.  And then, of course, I realised that just because they didn’t want to do it, there was no reason I shouldn’t … The result was Honeymoon with the Boss, which is out in June, for all those of you who might feel like escaping to the Maldives for an afternoon.

Otherwise, I have been having a very nice, pottery time – oh, the bliss of no deadline for a while! Still, I am just starting to feel as if I should knuckle to some work again.  Perhaps this will be the week I achieve something … I’m starting it on a high anyway, with the news that Newlyweds of Convenience is a finalist in the traditional category of the Booksellers’ Best Award, sponsored by Greater Detroit Romance Writers of America. This was incredible news for me, so much so that I actually thought the email was a joke at first.  But if you’ll forgive some boasting, the BBA news means that I’ve been short-listed in every contest I’ve entered this year and, more excitingly, that all three of my 2008 books (Promoted: to Wife and Mother, Newlyweds of Convenience and Last-Minute Proposal) made a final.  I can’t imagine ever having a year like this again, but as all three books were written in 2007, which was a very unhappy year for me, perhaps that’s just as well!