Oh, dear, I have been very, very slack about updating this diary. I can’t believe I last did it in May … whatever happened to June and July??? I have been drifting lazily through summer, loving the sunshine but finding it almost impossible to do any work. In fact, when I look back at the last two months, it’s hard to know what I’ve been doing. I did write a very rough draft of the next two books when I was away in June, and the plan was that I would set to and write a proper draft of the first one when I got back to my computer in July.

But first I had to go the Romantic Novelists’ Association Conference in Penrith, where I had rashly promised to give a talk. Since I didn’t feel able to talk about anything useful, like how to give your novel pace (the original request) – I don’t know how I write - I ended up giving a tongue-in-cheek guide to survival for romantic novelists, which would have been fine except for the fact that I decided to have some visuals to go with my talk and stumbled upon the delights of Powerpoint …Well, what a fantastic displacement activity that was!

By 10th July I could no longer use needing to prepare my talk as an excuse for not getting on with the book, and I have been trying to get going with the first book of the duet since then, but it is slow going. I’m not sure why it’s not clicking. I think I’m just not concentrating on it properly. There are too many other distractions in the summer and I don’t feel like writing. Which is not an adequate excuse, I know. I keep plodding on, and deciding that this will be yet another rough draft, but sometime I’m going to have to get a grip. I’d got as far as a very laboured Chapter 5 yesterday when I decided I needed to rethink the entire premise of the book – the basis of the emotional conflict between the hero and heroine – so I roughed out another outline which made me feel a bit better. At least I have a clearer idea about where it’s all going, and my heroine’s character is evolving, although Hal, the hero, is still a bit of an enigma. It will be interesting to see how he turns out in the end!

I’m off next week to enjoy the rest of the summer in Scotland and Greece. In theory, I will have a rough but complete draft done before I go, to which I will return in September, suitably refreshed and revitalised, but as we all know, theory and practice are two very different things …