Sorry, I completely missed a post last week and the next chapter was a few days late!

I have succumbed to the end of the year fever or otherwise known as the silly season!

Not long now and we’ll be in the New Year, the time when we have a few days to take stock and be either horrified or motivated by what lays ahead. But at present I’m just paddling hard to keep my head above water!

Writing, writing? What is that? That is the world I would prefer to be in, to continue to live in that world where I know what will come next, or perhaps not know but be the designer of it! Unfortunately, reality is really biting and my worlds are just glimpses of where I wish to be.

I have managed to keep reading, after all if there is traffic there is time for Suri to read to me! I have just finished a new Jo Nesbo, The Son, a thriller which is not a Harry Hole sequel. I have just begun to read Sister by Rosamund Lupton, a book I downloaded based on a good review by an editor on the Curtis Brown site. Both these books have very different voices and in the case of Jo Nesbo not what is accepted as ‘correct’. Jo Nesbo quite often gives a point of view from a dying character and Rosamund Lupton is writing in first person but almost as a letter to her sister who is missing, later found dead.

Due to the regular newsletters from some very good writing sites, such as Book Baby and more recently, Curtis Brown I have completed some research. It was on the Curtis Brown site I read an interesting blog, admittedly for children’s books, where an editor gave a list of what she liked to see in a manuscript. I realized than a number of the things she liked were not in my children’s book manuscript along with grabbing the reader in the first 3000 words. Of course I have used her advice to help me to focus on ways I can improve mine!

As for writing, it was lucky that so much was written on Living in London during the holidays resulting in mainly editing before posting.