Well, as suspected, I didn’t get the book finished while in London – one and three quarter chapters was the best I could do – and a crisis duly materialised when the chapter I had written while I was there vanished from the disk I was saving it onto. NB: always save onto the hard disk as well! I know this now, as I have been told it by countless men who have sucked in their teeth and shaken their heads at my rashness in entrusting my work to a floppy disk. By the time I’d heard this for what felt like the fifteenth time I was beginning to get a bit tight-lipped, but had to bite my tongue as it was a man who recovered my chapter (my hero!). And to be honest, it was worth enduring the lecture not to have to write it all over again. If it had been left to me, I would still be blubbing and beating my head against the desk with frustration – or possibly hunting round for a hammer to take out my feelings on the computer, because, really, what is the point of a machine that tells you the disk isn’t formatted when you know perfectly well that it IS …? Still, better not go there again. It took me three days to recover from the trauma of it all, hence my failure to complete all four remaining chapters.

However, as things turned out, I was still able to send the completed manuscript off on Sunday 30th March, a day ahead of my deadline, so felt exceedingly pleased with myself, but not nearly as pleased as I felt on the Wednesday when I heard back from my editor that she had already read it and that no revisions were required. Smug doesn’t begin to describe the way I felt then. I’ve done the art work details and the book’s been given a title, The Boss’s Baby Plan (don’t ask, it’s nothing to do with me), and all in three days! It’s the kind of week where you just think: what a great way to make a living! Have happily forgotten all about those long days spent staring at an empty screen, when every word has to be dragged kicking and screaming onto the page, and quailing under the pressure of a looming deadline.

My original plan was to put writing on a back burner now until autumn and concentrate on finishing my thesis, but I’ve been asked to write a story for the weekly online serial at www.eHarlequin.com . It’s a fantastic opportunity to promote the City Brides trilogy that is out this summer (check out the page) so I’m taking the two characters whose wedding kicks off the first book, Fiancé Wanted Fast! and giving them a story of their own. The problem with this is that because they were such minor characters, I gave them names that I never thought I’d want to use for a hero and heroine: Caro and Anthony. Had to reread Fiancé Wanted Fast! to see what I’d said about them – for a ghastly moment I thought I might have called him Jeremy. Fortunately I don’t seem to have committed myself to anything apart from their names, so there aren’t any other limits to their story, and who knows, maybe I’ll come round to those too!

Writing an online serial will be a new experience for me. It’s much shorter than the books I usually write, for a start, so I’ll have to think about structuring it a bit differently, and I’m guessing the writing will be even tighter than normal. I’ve always thought that short stories would be the most difficult things to write, and now it looks like I’m going to have a chance to find out!