Quality control

My revisions are back with my editor. The 'tweaks' ended up adding 5000 works so I had to get cutting. What with my love of adverbs -along with a new tendency to waffle and repeat myself - this wasn't nearly as painful as I'd imagined. In fact, it made a nice change from worrying I'll never make the word count, which happens with every book I write.

Now with a bit of a break, I've been baking muffins - carrot/orange and spinach/parmesan. Ostensibly these are snacks for my toddler, but obviously I've had to check they're OK. Quality control is so important, isn't it?!

Happy Thanksgiving

To all my American readers, Happy Thanksgiving!! I hope you have a lovely day.

Say It with Diamonds

My website now has a brand new page for my January M&B, Say It with Diamonds. There's the blurb, the inspiration for the story and an extract. Woohoo! (Have I mentioned how much I loved writing this story???) Check it all out here.

Revisions and happy endings

Revisions for Jack and Imogen's story have arrived and are mercifully minor. They mainly focus on adding a showdown scene to plumb the characters' emotional depths, and the intensifying the ending.

Intensifying the ending is a revision I often get, probably because as a deadline looms I tend to rush it. In real life I'm not hugely sentimental, so I'm always tempted to just write 'hey, sorry, I've been an idiot but I love you, so how about it?', but am aware this kind of approach may not be entirely appropriate in a romantic novel. After all the emotional build-up and the awful moment where it looks as if everything's gone irredeemably pear-shaped, the reader deserves a bit more than 'yeah, sure, why not?'.

So over the next day or two, I supsect it's not just my characters' emotional depths that are going to be plumbed, but mine too. It could be painful.

How do you feel about writing that happy ending? Do you love it or hate it?

A baby crow of doubt

I think I've given myself a bit of a challenge re the next book. I have a heroine with PTSD and some serious hangups and a story that, being Riva, is supposed to be sassy, flirty and sizzly. Hmm, not exactly a match made in heaven...

New Voices winner announced!

First of all many congratulations to the winner of the New Voices comp, Natalie Charles with her entry, The Seven Day Target. It's a fab story and a very worthy winner.

I'm back home after a few days in the UK which involved AMBA lunching and grandparent/grandson bonding, and have been fairly snowed under with exam marking and panicking about my next book. The latter has been through so many incarnations I've rewritten the first three thousand words half a dozen times at least. Therefore I have no plans this weekend except hopefully adding to my very paltry wordcount (NaNoWriMo is but a distant dream). Hope you're all up to something more exciting!