Well, the roses have faded and have had to be thrown out, but the bowl and the glow are still there, much aided by not having to do any revisions at all on the last manuscript. If this goes on, I will begin to think that maybe I can write romance after all …

I’m now in the blissful position of having no deadline until the end of October … it feels wonderful! I have to keep reminding myself that I can’t afford to relax too much, as there is very little of the summer unaccounted for, and the October deadline will swiftly be followed by one at the end of November, which effectively means writing the two books together. This is to be a duet, two linked books, and my brief was that one should be set in outback Australia and one in London. For a long time, that was all I had, but then I went out for a drink with the two friends who constitute my City Screen plotting team, and that was all it took for the ideas to start flowing. I’m not one of those who believes that writing is a solitary business – my best ideas come from a good argument about what makes for a realistic motivation over a bottle of wine!

My outline of the characters and plot for both books is currently with my editor, so I’m hoping she’ll like it. I’m planning to spend most of June down in Wiltshire, and to use that time to write a rough draft of both books, and then to try to get cracking on a proper draft of the first one when I’m back in York in July. I haven’t set a book in the outback for a while now, so am quite looking forward to writing about Australia again. The outback is definitely my favourite setting, and it will be an excuse for me to get out my old photos and sigh nostalgically over them again. This is a good stage in the writing process, when I’ve got an idea about the characters and a fairly clear notion of how the story will work, but haven’t actually had to get down to the hard graft of writing yet. I’ve always been good at talking about what I’m going to do; putting my money where my mouth is and making it happen is much harder for me!