Champagne at 38,000 Feet

Last Sunday it was my birthday (I'm now VERY old) - and thank you so much to everyone who sent greetings and then obviously thought I was a mardy mare for not replying - but I was celebrating it with champagne and The Toyboy Trucker and 300+ other people somewhere dizzily high in the sky above the Alps en route to Cyprus. How decadent was that??? Actually, it was just wonderful. Perfect. I cried with happiness (I cry VERY easily) when I found out about it. Cyprus was my surprise birthday present from TTT, Elle and The Doctor and I LOVED it. Had never been before and will go back as soon as poss. We left the UK early on my birthday morning with temperatures in single figures and a cutting northerly wind howling across a bleak sky - and landed 4 hours later in 35+ degrees of non-stop sunshine. It was one of the most blissful weeks of my life...

But now I'm back, feet firmly on the ground, shivering and WORKING. Well, I'm trying. The new book (Never Can Say Goodbye) is still going okay. It seems to be like Going the Distance and Hubble Bubble in the way it's kind of unfolding itself easily as I go along. Strangely (because I still have absolutely no idea how my books ever come into being, or how I write them, or why it seems natural to me to have this entire cast of REAL people living inside my head) my books don't follow the same pattern. Some like this one (so far) sort of write themselves, others need a lot more concentration and - er - work.

My early Orion books seemed to gush out with no problems (but then I was still all starry-eyed about being published and everything was all lovely and shiny and new), then the HarperCollins ones were much bigger and more complex and layered and therefore took longer and I had to make sure that all the ends tied up and all the sub-plots reached a conclusion as well as the main story thread. And since then, the Piatkus/Little,Brown ones have been a mix of the two. Love Potions gave me all sorts of headaches (mainly because when the title was changed from Flower Power {considered too hippie} I realised I hadn't actually got any love potions in it and had to go back and slot them in); Heaven Sent was far too short but I'd told the story and anything else would have been padding; Happy Birthday was too long (in my opinion) and probably should have been two books...

And The Way To A Woman's Heart....??? Well, once I'd stopped being a diva-bitch-from-hell author and got over it no longer being called Midnight Feast, and accepted that Sunny (heroine) was now called Ella, and that it had to be a longer, meatier story (sorry, bit of a pun as it's about cookery) with a bigger cast of characters, less obvious practical magic and more grounded reality but still series-linked to the previous books - oh, and amusing, I finally knuckled down and just did it.

I suppose, as a writer, that's what it's all about really - just doing it. No-one else is going to. Sadly, it's taken me years to realise that! Much as there were many, many mornings when I'd switch on the computer and hope that the Tailor of Gloucester's mice had written several thousand words of The Way To A Woman's Heart overnight, eventually I accepted that if I didn't do it then it would never be finished. Weird though how the changing of the title and the heroine's name made it the most difficult book I've ever written. Still, it's done, I'm happy with it - and hopefully the slog/sweat/angst/difficult-author-tantrums won't show...

Never Can Say Goodbye (and that is going to be the title - they've had the discussion about maybe changing it to something else and happily decided to stick with my "let's get away from the cutesy magicky titles" title - so that's one hurdle - um - hurdled) is developing into a completely different book. The magic is slightly more - um - spooky. The characters are more eccentric (as in Brian from the kebab van and Maisie the Useless Medium). The situations more down-to-earth - well, in a sort of off-the-wall way. And much as I thought that after actually having to "work" on The Way To A Woman's Heart (I really hate work!) I'd never find my mo-jo or my writing joi-de-vivre again, so far I'm having fun with it. Which is just as well as it has to be finished by Christmas. Erk!

Blimey! This post is almost writerly. Still, the next one won't be as I've got to blog about total rubbish. Even more total rubbish than usual because our local council has just ventured into the multi-wheely-bin-refuse-disposal-system and you wouldn't believe the uproar this has caused in the terrace... FIVE wheely bins, all different colours, all for different things, all collected on different days... It's causing anarchy here, I can tell you. Anarchy.

Oh, and tonight I'm going to the theatre again with The Toyboy Trucker - but this time to see Frankie Boyle - so probably this is not going to be a repeat of the erudite cerebral Stephen Fry experience... Can't wait!