My secret weapon

Just glanced over to my bookshelf and was horrified to discover how many mugs have collected there in the last day or so. No wonder I can't find anything to drink out of downstairs (I have my desk and bookshelf in my bedroom - oh, for an office!).

Hate to think what might be mouldering at the bottom of some of those cups...

But it's obviously working! Progress is good on the book. So perhaps I should just stop mug-hoarding, wash up and boil the kettle once more.

Back to work!

Work on the latest book (imaginative working title: "Jennie & Alex" - and, yes, it's Jennie, the eloping sister from Invitation To The Boss's Ball) ground to a halt while the kids were off school for half term and we spent a week away in Norfolk with the family. Lovely scenery, good weather, great company.

I was walking on Holkham beach one afternoon and realised there was something familiar about it, and then I turned an looked back towards the shoreline, where a row of pine trees seperated the dunes from the sky.


Even though I'd never been there before, I recognised this beach - and a flash of a familar image from the back of my memory gave me the reason why. Holkham Beach is the wonderful wide stretch of sand that Gwyneth Paltrow walks up at the end of 'Shakespeare In Love' as the credits roll.

I would definitely like to go back when the weather is more like it is in the bottom picture than it was in mine!

Anyway, work on the new book is now going great guns (haven't reached the end of chapter three yet - one of my 'sticking points'), and at the moment I'm loving my heroine, loving my set up and loving the secondary characters.

I fear for the safety of said characters, though. My beginnings always end up too waffly and I end up having to cut words and people. But I need Auntie Barb with the orange foundation to complicate matters for Jennie now so she can't escape the hero later. And I need Jennie's parents' in there to paint a fuller picture of her character before Alex turns her world upside-down. Sigh. I just hope my editor agrees when I turn the book in!