The big news this month is the launch of www.harlequinromanceauthors.com - a joint effort by a number of Harlequin Romance and Mills & Boon Tender to try and alert readers to what a great line this is … contemporary stories that  give you just what you want from a romance.  Apart from news about forthcoming releases, there’s a ‘Day in the life of’ each author – a twist on the standard biographies – and a Café Corner, where you can eavesdrop on the conversations Romance authors have when they get together.  The website was only launched on Sunday, so we’ll be revising it and adding new features as time goes by, but do have a look and let us know what you think. 

Ah, yes, Paris!  Here I am looking very happy in the Luxembourg Gardens.  Absolutely more fun than just writing romance, but have yet to come properly down to earth and am consequently having great difficulty concentrating on the job in hand.  I hadn’t quite finished the last book (now called The Blind-Date Proposal) before I left, but I had been a good enough girl to be allowed to go, and it only took a couple of days to finish it when I got back.  My editor has had a look at it and it only needed a couple of minor revisions, so I’m hoping that as far as the City Brides trilogy goes, it is now two down, one to go …

I am just about to start the second – and hopefully final – draft of the current book, which so far has been going spookily well.  Normally I manage about 40 pages of a first draft but this one is already 95 pages long, and at times I just didn’t seem to be able to shut my characters up.  Of course, not trying to do another job at the same time helped, but generally I think it’s just that some books acquire a life of their own and others, like the one I have just finished, never quite click.  So I’m hoping that this book will continue to write itself ...

Am busily touching wood, though, as updating this diary is a bit of a displacement activity in lieu of starting back at Chapter One, which could be a bad sign.  I’m sure I’ll be all right once I get going though, as this time I have a very clear idea of my heroine, Kate, and the hero, Finn, and where they are (London) and what they’re doing (the usual!), and the assorted secondary character ...

Well, I did get past Chapter 5 eventually, but it was a struggle right to the end!  I finally sent the book off a week or so later than my original deadline which wasn’t too bad when it felt as if I had been writing it for ever.  I’m still not sure why that particular story never clicked, in spite of moments thinking that it was just about to, and frankly I was desperate to get rid of it in the end.

It’s been great to have a couple of weeks away from it, including  a trip down to London for the Jubilee holiday, but since I came back I have been braced for my editor’s comments.  I was convinced I would end up having to rewrite the entire book, or possibly to be told to give up writing altogether (a recurrent fantasy, based on the absence of choice and responsibility like most fantasies), but in the event, of course, things weren’t nearly that bad.  In fact, there were lots of things she really liked about the book, much to my surpr ...

Anyway, after we had sorted that out, she asked me what the problem was, and after I had wittered on about various other distractions in my life, I started to talk about the plot and why I didn’t think it was working, which was the first time I’d really articulated what was wrong with it.  It was incredibly helpful to talk it through with someone who understands how plots work and how far you can go with ch ...

Really must pull myself together now, though.  I haven’t so much as opened Chapter Five for nearly a week, and I am at last beginning to feel tense about  the approaching deadline.   So updating this diary is my last job before I get back to work.  I have had to tear up my timetable and am now trying a different approach, which is to not let myself even check my email until I have written ten pages, let alone reply to any messages.  Not sure how long this particular discipline will last, but it feels as if drastic measures are called f ...

For those of you who suspected that putting all that time in at the bar was just an excuse, let me tell you that it paid off!  After an evening spent listening to me whimpering about how I was blocked on the plot front, a friend made a suggestion which proved to be just the breakthrough I needed.  It was such a relief to be able to send my editor a synopsis that for a while I overlooked the fact that I still had to actually write the book, and it was a bit of a shock to sit down and confront a blank screen again.  I have spent the last couple of weeks doing a very rough draft - little more than notes and scraps of dialogue – and decided this time not to try and divide it up into chapters at this stage.  Instead I aimed to fill 50 pages, the theory being that I would then just have to bulk each page out into four.  So far, I have done 35, and have given myself until the end of this weekend to finish.  I  might settle for 40+ pag ...