Here I am, back staring at a blank screen and pondering the nature and benefits of blogging.  Blogs are like mobile phones or computers … it hardly seems any time since they were a kind of specialised interest – you knew what it was, sort of,  but it wasn’t anything to do with you – and suddenly they’re everywhere and you wonder: when did that happen? 

The first time I came across a computer was when I worked for Operation Raleigh in the 1980s, and it took up a whole room.  Now it’s hard to imagine life without them.  I wrote my first few books on an electric typewriter, endlessly Tippexing and altering page numbers, but eventually inherited my brother’s Amstrad, which changed my life.  I’m always very resistant to new technology and then adapt with the fervour of a new convert the moment I succumb (usually about five years after everyone else has moved on to something new) although I never actually learn how to use them properly. 

Anyway, back to the blog, or lack of one.  I was having a discussion with a friend this morning about whether it was a writing diary by another name, or in fact something different.  I was having a bit of a crisis about whether anyone actually cared where I was on the writing front, so why was I bothering etc., etc., but on the other hand, why would anyone read it if it wasn’t for the fact that I was a writer ….  The upshot of the discussion was that I should stop worrying about it, bang out a couple of paragraphs once a month and for God’s sake, let’s get back to discussing the frocks at the Oscars (top marks to Helen Mirren – wish I could like her now, let alone when I’m 61; Cate Blanchett, elegant but wrong colour for her; Nicole Kidman, no, no, no; and so on … and of course, I’d know so much about style being a middle-aged woman living in a provincial city in the north of England who dresses entirely for comfort and went into town wearing my dog-walking jacket this morning)

But for those of you who are interested in how a book gets written (anyone out there?), I am just about to finish Chapter 7 of the first draft.  I’ve done pretty well at sticking to my seven pages a day, but haven’t get built up a momentum that lets me get ahead of myself, and yesterday I went out for a drink in the evening and went to bed a page short (bad, bad, bad – am paying for it today).  So I’m on target, more or less.  Often when I get to Chapter 7 I plunge into a slough of despond (all rubbish, can’t write, hate my characters, wooden dialogue, aaaargh, etc.) and it’s worrying me slightly that I haven’t done this yet.  Clearly it will all need a lot of tightening and tidying up next time round, but I am convinced by the premise of this story (hero a single father, preoccupied by three adolescents, heroine trying to cope with elderly mother and both wondering if they have the time or the energy to put into a new relationship, however attracted they are to each other) and the story does seem to be making sense.  On the other hand, I’m still waiting for the magic ‘click’ – that may not come until the next draft, when (the theory goes) it should all fall into place.

I’m going to have lunch with my editor in London next week, and will be part of a panel answering questions in a session organised by the Romantic Novelists’ Association on March 10th, so it would be nice to have this draft finished before I go.  In which case, I’d better get back to it …