In the end I managed 42 pages of an initial draft – phew!  I feel quite happy with the story line, and think I can see how it’s all going to work. The trouble is that once I’ve got over the panic of what the story is going to be, it feels in my head as if I’ve already done it, and I can’t be bothered with writing it all out!  But there’s only one way to get the story from my head onto the page, and that’s writing …

Now comes the hard graft of bulking it out and making the characters and their emotions come to life.  I find it very hard to concentrate at this stage, and have been endlessly distracted over the last couple of days by visiting Liz Fielding and Natasha Oakley, who’ve been blogging on eHarlequin, and attending the Pink Heart Society Party.  Much time was wasted trying to register at Yahoo and eHarlequin, and I got thoroughly confused about what I was doing, but I do seem to have made contact at last.  I have nothing but admiration for Natasha and Liz, who are blogging (and brilliantly, I might add) several times a day – the only downside to joining in is that you end up feeling deeply inadequate when you realise just how much authors like these are managing to fit into every day, and how much effort they put into promoting not just their own books but the whole Romance line.  Every time this happens, I resolve to try harder, and every time I slip back into my reclusive comfort zone …

Anyway, the draft is coming, but slowly, and I have complicated my timetable somewhat by committing myself to a 30,000 word story for next year’s Mother’s Day anthology which has to be delivered by mid May.  This has meant bringing forward my deadline for the current book by a month.  I have written out a list of all my available writing days between now and May 9th, and I should be able to do it (always supposing I can think of a story for Mother’s Day!) but can’t afford to slip behind at all.  I’m starting slowly by giving myself a low target of 7 pages a day, which should, in theory, give me ten chapters of 14 pages each by March 14th.  The idea is that once I get some momentum going, I’ll be able to do much more than 7 pages (when I’m working at full throttle, I’ll do 15-20) and will thus get ahead of myself and have a huge psychological boost!  At the moment, this is still just a theory.  I’ve done two chapters (28 pages) and am trying not to think about how far there is still to go …