A month of firsts

It's been six and a half weeks since I got 'The Call'. In some ways it feels like a lot longer...

At first there was the giddy excitement and the copious amount of celebrating. There was a lot of celebrating. Wine, much of it fizzy. Good times.

There were the first real revisions on a book I knew somebody wanted. I received them in the middle of a shopping centre on an exhausting back-to-school trip with my daughter. They looked overwhelming and my mind went blank; where to start? But once I calmed down and thought it through, once I began writing, it all made sense. The suggestions all strengthened the book, strengthened the conflict, ramped up the emotions. I sat at my desk one night, fuelled by gin and finally, three rewrites later, got to the crux of my hero.

I may have said 'I love you' out loud. I blame the gin.

I went to the M&B author party which was terrifying and brilliant in equal measure and I loved it.

Then there was a flurry of non-writing stuff. I wanted to concentrate on starting book 3 properly but it all needed to be done. A q&a for the author website meant I finally had to decide just who, dead or alive,  I would invite to a fictional dinner party. I had to find photos (eek), change my twitter name, set up an author page on Facebook, buy a domain name and a host for a website which took me two days and some tears. I haven't been able to face actually populating the website yet!

A contract to sign.

RNA membership to turn from New Writer to Full.

My aptly titled wonderland dress

A sudden obsession with Game of Thrones. Three violent, debauched and pure character driven episodes a night for two weeks in which I should have been preparing book 3, only surely watching such great storytelling is research. Surely?

And last week my first AA's and edits for Minty all in one day.

The AA's were incredibly surreal. I have read the book on screen more times than I care to remember. I have read it printed out. I have read it on Kindle (I always, always do several read throughs on kindle, it's a great way to test pace and find sentences that read oddly in a book setting), but to read it set out as a real, proper book was the moment it all became real. Summer Fling has graduated from a file on my netbook (and Dropbox. Always back up people.) to a book that has been edited, copy edited and type set.

And it has a new name, just like its proud creator.

The Return of Mrs Jones will be published by Mills & Book Cherish/Harlequin Romance in April 2014.

I hope you like it.