Thank you so much for all your comments on where I might start the next book. No sheikhs, no royalty … phew!  And the message I got from my new editor was only to write those kind of stories if I could really buy into that fantasy, which I can’t, so I can draw a line under that.  Instead, I’m going back to office settings with younger heroines (good call, Anne and Nell!) and the third one of the year will be a Christmas wedding story.   For the first book, I’m starting with the title originally proposed for the book I’ve just finished, but which wasn’t right for that.  It’s going to be called Cinderella’s Wedding Wish (don’t look at me, I just write the books). 

I spent New Year with friends in Scotland – on the Solway coast, where The Right Kind of Man was set, for you fans of Skye and Lorimer – and on New Year’s Day we walked out to Castle Point and did the plotting that usually takes place over a bottle of wine.  I think the Cinderella in the title really just indicates a story about an ordinary girl and a man from a much richer, more glamorous milieu, but we had a lot of fun playing around with fairytale and thinking of modern, urban equivalents for the fairy godmother, the glass slipper, the ugly sisters and so on. 

I’ve still got the Ladybird story of Cinderella by Muriel Levy, with illustrations by Evelyn Bowmar, that I had as a very little girl and that I used to make my mother read every night.  I couldn’t read it myself then, but I knew all the pictures and watched like a hawk so that she wouldn’t skip a page as she was always trying to do.  I loved the spangly dress she wore to the ball, but my favourite was her wedding dress – ghastly, isn’t it?  But when I was four, I thought it was absolutely beautiful.  I even mentioned it in a book once, when the heroine pretended that she had been married in a dress exactly like Cinderella’s.  (If anyone can tell me the name of that heroine or the title of the book, I’ll know you’re a real fan and you can have a special prize!)  Good to know that my dress sense has moved on – although I can’t say the same for my humour.  I still laugh at the Teddy Robinson books, which were my other absolute favourite bedtime stories.  I’m someone must have done a thesis on the influence of one’s earliest reading in later life.  The romance of Cinderella and the absurdity of Teddy Robinson were pretty accurate indicators of mine, it has to be said.

I seem to have digressed from writing … but perhaps that’s the point of a blog.  I’m never sure.  Anyway, my next task is to type up everything I can remember from the plotting walk and see if any of it can fit together.  I might end up using all of it or none of it, but the important thing is to get something down on paper and then I’ll feel as if I’ve made a start.  I’ve got plenty of time to write this one, and it would be nice if – for once – I could get going early and have time in hand instead of writing the entire thing in the last two weeks before the deadline.  Not messing around until the last minute is one of my resolutions for 2008!  Like most people, I don’t have a great track record in keeping New Year resolutions, but I’d really like to tackle this year with a fresh outlook, and writing ahead of my deadlines would be a very good place to start.