I am very conscious that I haven’t updated this blog since the beginning of April but the last few weeks have been a very unhappy time for me, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could say apart from that.  Or, at least, I could have bored you with all the gory details, the way I’ve been boring all my incredibly patient friends, but that wouldn’t have been very professional, would it?  And if I’d pretended that everything was fine and that I was writing away nicely even though half my life had fallen apart, that wouldn’t have been authentic – and it seems to me that there’s no point in a blog unless it is authentic.  So I decided not to blog at all, because it all seemed too hard.

The fact that I’m writing this now must mean that I’m a bit better, I suppose.  I’ve also been pushed to finish a 30,000 word story for a Centenary Mother’s Day anthology next year.  I did just manage to scrape under my deadline, but I can’t recommend writing a happy love story when your own relationship has just crashed and burned.  It’s all too poignant.  But anyway, it’s done, and there was definitely an element of normality in the process: plod, plod, plod, finish two days before deadline, reread, feel aghast, rewrite entirely… Same old, same old.

I don’t feel that I’m writing very well at the moment.  Quite apart from the emotional upheaval, I’ve had tight deadlines on both the last two books, so I’m going to start thinking about the next one straight away.  The deadline isn’t until the end of July, but I wondering if I might write better if I had a bit more time to spare.  No doubt it will end up exactly as it always does (see paragraph above) but it’s nice at this stage to imagine a leisurely writing process with everything carefully plotted out and time to think about finding exactly the right word… I have, in fact, already had a couple of proto-plotting sessions over coffee, but am hoping to get my ‘plotting team’ together over a bottle of wine next week.  Then I’ll just need the crucial bath, and I’ll be off…