Warmest congrats to IMOGEN BLYTH who has won the first Chances competition! I’ll post another one up very soon!
I’m having a wonderful – if exhausting – week. Thanks to you, Chances sold 11,000 copies in just 3 days and rampaged into the charts at number 13. It’s utterly thrilling – and I’m extremely grateful to my lovely readers for supporting me because times are tough out there and your pennies are precious. Thank you.
I had great fun on Channel 5′s the The Wright Stuff yesterday – an hour and three quarters of live TV. I’ve done the show before – Matthew is a wonderful guy, always puts me at my ease and always brandishes a copy of my book for the cameras! Thanks, mate! If you missed it, you can watch it again on their website. I’ve had many compliments about the little cardi I was wearing – it’s my fave and it’s by Nougat London.
Had a wonderful afternoon today – Georgia swam for the first time in our stream, discovering a pool that went up to her chin. On the bank, Felix and Twiggy made friends with…a snake. I hopped up and down shrieking from the other bank – but it turns out it was a grass snake, now a ‘pet’ called April Shy.
This weekend, I’m off to the Parelli Celebration of Natural Horsemanship in Birmingham – a real highlight of my year. Next week, busy busy with radio, a talk in St Albans and more TV – the Vanessa Show, on Channel 5 next Friday 15th. Which just so happens to be my darling Felix’s 10th birthday…
I can’t believe we’re a quarter way through the year. Gawd, what an old person’s thing to say that was! Needless to say, time has flown with my life peppered with highs and lows. Secrets was published in early February as a special edition for the UK airports – some of you loyal readers even made the trip to an airport just to grab a copy. I thank you from my heart.
I’m a perfectionist control-freak when it comes to my novels – some authors are quite content for editing work to be done on their behalf. I throw a hissy fit if anyone dares tinker with even a comma! Although I have done 10 novels in 12 years – an output many people marvel at – I do not ‘churn them out’. Each novel is carefully considered with in-depth research undertaken and by the time I submit it to my publisher, it’s in third draft. To arrive at those 130,000 words of original fiction, many thousands more words are written in the process! Then, after editing and copy-editing (which is to double check if the character’s eyes are blue in one chapter, they’re not suddenly brown in another!) the 5th and final draft of the novel is typeset and two rounds of proof-reading commence. Typesetting is bewildering. Somehow, entire sentences disappear! Elsewhere, paragraphs suddenly appear in italics. Invariably, words are split at the end of a line and look bad for it. Finally the work is ready to be sent to the printers – and I await my final copies.
The thrill of seeing my novels in book form has not diminished over the years. It’s the highlight of so much hard work, hope and energy. Imagine, therefore, how distressing it is when mistakes are made utterly beyond your control…. (more…)
Well, the last thing I won was probably a gymkhana when I was eight – so to be awarded the Romantic Novel of the Year 2008 for Pillow Talk was an awesome moment in my life. It was going to be a lovely day, whatever the outcome, as it was Georgia’s 5 th birthday and also publication day for the paperback edition of Pillow Talk. I was still in my slummy-mummy uniform of old jeans and jumper half an hour before the taxi arrived but as my lovely friend Jeanette always says: “you do scrub up well, love.”! It was such a thrill being short-listed in January – the first time it has happened for me. I shared the short-list with fellow authors Jojo Moyes, Adele Parks, Catrin Collier, Catherine King and Maureen Lee.
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