October

I'm still editing LOOKING AT THE STARS but the publication date has been pushed back again - to February 2014! This is for a couple of reasons, one of which has absolutely nothing to do with me and everything to do with publishing schedules, but actually I don't mind. It takes the pressure off my rewrite, which is nice because I've not had the time and energy to work on it as I'd have liked.

My eldest daughter, Jemima, has just started school - !! If you go to my news of 2008 you can read all about her as a baby - time has flown since then! Harriet is still delightful and is now discovering the world of Food and the distance a spoonful of yoghurt can be thrown!

So a new routine of school/childcare is being established, which means I am having small bouts of allocated Writing Time to crack on with the edits, phew. I have a new deadline of November to deliver the re-draft, and I would really like to make it, even if it means missing a little bit more of that precious sleep!

At the end of September, I did a school event at Our Lady's Abingdon, my old school, which was great fun. I wrote about it on my Sweet Hearts blog but here's a photo of me with the lovely readers at OLA:

I would love to do some more school visits but they're difficult to arrange around Harriet at the moment. Tomorrow, however, I am planning to attend the Oxfordshire Book Awards, which I went to last year and much enjoyed. I will try to remember to take my camera!

June

Yes, well, I missed April and May but that's because I gave birth to my daughter Harriet! All went well and she is just delightful - and thankfully she likes her sleep, so I'm not quite as exhausted as I was expecting to be!

In the meantime, DEEP WATER, the last Sweet Hearts book, has been published and I'm thrilled with it - it's all blue and silver and shiny beautiful! In a way I am sad to see the end of the series because I've loved writing it - but on the other hand, it's been a very busy three years so it's quite nice to be able to take a bit of a break. Well, sort of - I'm trying to edit LOOKING AT THE STARS in the odd hour I get here and there!

Another book recently out is LOVE BITES, with Barrington Stoke - a vampire story! Not my usual thing at all but it was loads of fun to write! The computer screen doesn't do it justice - that grey colour is silver on the real thing so it looks stunning!

I'm hoping very much to be able to meet my September deadline for the edits on LOOKING AT THE STARS and when I do get my hour here and there I'm really enjoying working on it. In the meantime I'm still managing parts of Girls Heart Books and blogging occasionally too - it's a fantastic site and I'm so very proud of it.

 

March

It's been another busy time! I finished the edits on DEEP WATER, the sixth and final book in the Sweet Hearts series, which was a great relief. I have enjoyed writing the books enormously but it's been quite a treadmill, finishing one book and starting the next immediately. It'll be nice to write something different for a while!

In February, MODEL BEHAVIOUR, Sweet Hearts book 5, was published:

 

I don't think authors are supposed to have favourite books, but this was such fun to write and it's definitely my favourite from the whole series (shh!). I love that the cover is green, not pink or a typically 'girly' colour - and my only regret is that Harry, the cute boy, had to be removed from the cover before it was published (because apparently it made the book look too 'old' and 'sophisticated' for its target audience!). You can see how gorgeous he looked in the early version of the cover to the right!

I did manage to do a school event in January, at Burford School in Oxfordshire, arranged by the lovely librarian Lynne Cooper. I was quite pregnant at the time but they provided me with lots of biscuits so that kept me going!!

Speaking of pregnancy, I'm due very soon now, so hopefully my next update will be news of the new baby! As for LOOKING AT THE STARS, my standalone novel (Random House has accepted it, hurrah!), I have been working hard on the edits but it will be a while before the book is published - July 2013 - because of the baby. Hopefully I can get back to it before too long but for now I'm just concentrating on staying well and looking forward to the new addition to our family!