My April 30th deadline has galvanized me into action at last, and I have been lashed to my computer for the past week.  So far I am on schedule (just).  I’m due to finish Chapter 5 tonight, which will leave me nine days to do the other five chapters, so I must keep my head down and not get distracted.  Unfortunately, the 130 pages I laboured through in March have turned out to be pretty useless.  I made a mistake this time in skipping the rough draft stage.  Usually, I do a rough draft of about four or five pages a chapter, just to sketch out what’s going to happen and then do a proper draft of 14 or 15 pages (my final version is usually 17 or 18 pages a chapter). Then, when I come to rewrite it, I find I can use a lot of the draft, which just needs to be expanded a little.  But this time I panicked about not having enough time so went pretty much straight into the draft stage – because I’ve written 50 books now, so I know how to do it, right?  Wrong!!! 

I have been using some bits from the draft, but it’s all over the place and I have been getting in such a muddle turning the pages backwards and forwards to find what I want that in the end it turns out to be quicker to rewrite it completely.  Anyway, I am sticking with it and it is falling into place better now, although I am getting worried that I have too much plot (always a big mistake, and I ought to know better).  May have to do some brutal chopping by the time I get to Chapter 8, but will have to worry about that when I get there.  At the moment I’ll just be relieved to have Chapter 5 behind me and be half way through.

While I’m struggling with my book, do visit the Where are you? page if you haven’t been before, or even if you have, to see what’s new.  I was very excited on Saturday to find three new countries added: Spain, Czech Republic and Denmark - thank you, whoever you are!  That makes a total of 38 countries registered on the map, and if you run your cursor over the flags you can see where other readers come from.  This is still absolutely my favourite page, and I’m thinking it would be fabulous if we could get to a total of 50 countries registered, to stick with my 50 books, 50 year theme.  That’s only another 12 to go, and there are still several countries missing where I’ve heard from readers in the past (Italy, Greece, India, Sweden, Venezuela, Turkey, Philippines, Ireland … where are you all??) so go on, have a click and light up your place in the world!  I’ve still got plenty of photos to go up.  The latest are of Scotland.  Fans of The Right Kind of Man (well, I know there are two of you from the Pick Your Own survey, of which more next time) may recognise the walk Skye and Lorimer took together. 

Right, back to Chapter 5…