So, as predicted, the understairs cupboard never got cleared out, and my geraniums are still quailing in the fog and the frost (I really am going to be them in the shed this weekend), but I met my deadline and sent the book off by email a whole 24 hours ahead of schedule.

 

After my last entry here, I finished Chapter Ten and then sat down to reread the book as a whole … which was fine until I got to Chapter Nine. It and Chapter Ten were terrible, I thought, and I felt very depressed about it all. I convinced myself that I couldn’t do anything about it, and agreed with my very kind editor that I would send the book in as it was, but when it came down to it, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I hate letting anyone read something I’m not happy with. Sometimes letting an editor look at it with a more dispassionate eye is the only thing to do, but on the this occasion, I opted to rewrite Chapters Nine and Ten in their entirety in a couple of days. I’d been staying with a friend who is going to Australia at the end of this week (lucky cow), and she was telling me about a huge spider her brother had seen in Queensland, (this kind of chat is called ‘doing research’) and I used this to inject some badly-needed life into a scene where my heroine, Bea, realises just how out of place she is in the outback. I even managed to get in the horrific story, courtesy of the same brother, of the friend of his who opened a drawer and a spider jumped out and bit him on the face … you’ll need to read the book (provisionally entitled THE WEDDING CHALLENGE and out at the end of 2002) to find out how this kind of skin-crawling account fits into a romance. (Still on the subject of spiders, the guy who installed my new cooker last week told me that on average, every one of us eats three spiders in our sleep during our lifetimes from sleeping with our mouths open … yukky statistic, or what??)

 

Anyway, the spider incident was just what I needed to break my block, so I was much happier when I sent the book off.  I heard back from my editor last Friday, with her suggestions about how a couple of scenes could be improved, but the changes were very straightforward (and so obvious I should have been able to spot them for myself) so it wasn’t the crisis I was dreading, and when I reread the manuscript I was quite surprised to find myself laughing at a couple of points, as if I’d never come across the story before. I’ve emailed back my revised version this morning, so am hoping that this will be OK.

 

This evening, I have emailed an outline for the next three books, which I’d like to link, based around three girls sharing a house in London – yes, I am on a roll and roaring through my ‘to do’ list … at this rate, I will get all my Christmas cards done before 24^th December. And talking of Christmas, I can see already that I won’t get round to updating this until the New Year, so this might be a good time to thank all those of you who have logged on to the website this year, and especially those who have sent me messages – I don’t know if you have any idea how encouraging it is to hear that there is someone out there who reads and enjoys the stories I struggle over here at my computer! I wish you all a very happy Christmas, and a peaceful and joyous 2002.