August 19, 2010 | Getting Away With It, covers

Still on holiday. Still alive, after, miraculously, not getting killed whilst being dragged around a lake on a tube by Kathy Love’s insane cousins.

Well. Sort of alive.

But I have to share this, the brand new cover for my brand new book, GETTING AWAY WITH IT!

Hooray!!

It’s out in hardback in October, which is really not very far away now….!

August 11, 2010 | about me

On Monday, my dad and I thought we’d go for a little ride in his speedboat on the lake. He asked if I wanted to drive, and I said yes. It was a beautiful sunny day, with no other boats on the lake, and I thought this would be a good chance to pootle around on the other side of the lake, the one without any camps on it, to look at the trees and the rocks and the mountains. I figured it would be about a fifteen-minute ride.

(Cue Gilligan’s Island music: A fifteen-minute ride. A FIFTEEN-MINUTE RIDE.)

So off we went, to the other side of the lake. The FAR side, the side beyond the island which sits about 1/3 of the way across the lake, where nobody lives at all, except for deer and moose and raccoons and sixty million black flies. We were happily motoring along, when I decided to hit the throttle a little bit and go faster.

Roar of engine. Boat didn’t move.

“I think there’s some weed stuck in the propellor,” said my dad. We raised the engine to have a look.

No propellor. It had fallen off. And sunk to the bottom of the lake.

We had one oar, no cell phone. We were on the other side of the island, invisible to my mother on the beach. My dad started paddling. It was about 2 pm. My cousins were arriving about 3. We figured we’d get back maybe around 5. Or possibly end up living on the island in makeshift huts along with a movie star and a professor.

Fortunately, we saw a lone boat motoring past the island, and I stood up on the bow and started waving the day-glo orange life vest, which attracted his attention. Turned out it was our neighbour, who’d just happened to decide to take a boat ride that afternoon. He towed us back to shore, just in time for our cousins to witness our ignominious return.

Next time, I’m bringing a phone. And another oar. And a trunkful of sequinned gowns.

August 9, 2010 | about me

(Photo by Sharon Morton Dudley. I’m the one inelegantly sprawled behind the “88″ sign, talking with Danny McDonald.)

I went to high school with all these people! And I borrowed the shoes I’m wearing from my MOM. Orange and purple crocodile heels. Isn’t she cool?

August 1, 2010 | hero worship

Tomorrow I’m flying off to Maine to see the family. And go to a high school reunion. I’m also hoping to finish the first draft of this book, so I can get stuck into the serious job of revising all the parts I’ve got wrong.

So I won’t be updating this blog very often for a little while, unless something REALLY exciting happens, or alternatively, if I get bored.

But because I love you all, I’ll leave you with this lovely lovely photo of Robert Downey Jr punching his own hand.

July 23, 2010 | courses, reading

I’m putting together a reading list for my Writing Women’s Commercial Fiction course, and though I’m choosing three or four books myself as course material, I’m thinking of including a secondary list of recommendations from writing professionals and keen readers.

Can you help me out? What’s the best commercial women’s fiction title you’ve read this year?

It can be a romance, saga, chick lit, historical, blockbuster…whatever area of commercial women’s fiction you prefer.

I’ve got a few criteria—I’d like it to be something published in the UK market, and I’d like it to be quite recent.

Leave your recommendation in the comments, or you can email it to me, or tweet it, or Facebook it…whatever you like. Tell your friends. Tell your mum. Tell your dog…oh, wait, dogs don’t read.

Thanks!

July 22, 2010 | about me

Last night we went out for dinner, as we’re having our kitchen ripped out and the house was full of plaster dust. (More on that in another post.) Anyway, the Rock God said he’d pay for dinner (bless him), and he pulled out a £50 note.

I haven’t seen a £50 note for a very long time, my purse tending to be full rather of 20p pieces, and Fecklet had never seen one before. Upon discerning the illustration on the back of it, he immediately cried, “It’s James May!”

The thing is, I can’t quite disagree with him:

James May, presenter on Top Gear

Sir James Houblon, first Governor of the Bank of England, 1694

I await the day he mistakes the Queen for Jeremy Clarkson.

July 19, 2010 | interviews

Monday, Monday, Monday. I did nothing at all yesterday, just schlepped around the house with the Fecklet and watched Madagascar and washed some towels, so today I have to work extra hard on my book to catch up.

Meanwhile, I’m being interviewed today on brand new shoe and book blog, High Heels and Book Deals.

Thanks for inviting me, Mel!

July 18, 2010 | Google me

This blog comes up second on a Google search for “big donkey dicks”.

Ah, fame, you elusive creature.

July 16, 2010 | courses

I’ve been informed by the lovely Helen Corner that the deadline for the 10% discount for bookings on my Writing Commercial Women’s Fiction course is the end of next week.

It’s a three-day residential course, in the beautiful surroundings of Charney Manor, Charney Basset, Oxfordshire. The course covers character, structure, pacing, conflict, style and submitting your work to an agent or publisher. The actual content of the course is different every time because it’s tailored to the needs of the participants; you’ll submit your work, which will then be used as teaching and learning materials. You also end up with a detailed crit and a one-on-one session to talk about your work and your writing career, with either me or Helen Corner, the founder of Cornerstones Literary Consultancy.

I’ve led this course three or four times now and it’s absolutely inspiring, for me at least, and I hope for the participants as well. I keep in touch with a lot of the participants and it’s great to see them go from strength to strength in their writing.

This year, it’s from 27-29 September. You can get 10% off the price of the course if you book before 23rd July. Full price is £675 which includes tuition, accommodation, (yummy) food, and a guest speaker (usually an agent or an author).

Contact me or Cornerstones for more details.

July 16, 2010 | Uncategorized

I’m guest blogging on Minxes of Romance today, talking about the RNA conference. For those of you who are insanely curious, there’s also a pic of me with my “after” hair there.

July 13, 2010 | Uncategorized

I’m going to cheat on this one and just say—go look at the pictures of shoes at the gala dinner, on the RNA blog.

(Mine are in the third picture from top, on the right hand side, next to Lara’s sandals. I wonder what we were talking about when the picture was taken…)

July 12, 2010 | about me

So last Saturday I went for a picnic with my friend, who said, “I love your hair right now.” Of course, in the way of all rational females, I took this to mean that it was an awful colour and I had to dye it immediately. So Sunday night I armed myself with a packet of brown semi-permanent dye, the kind that works in 10 minutes, and, posting a short message about it on my blog, I went upstairs to apply it.

Remembering the whole giraffe-neck debacle of last time, I made sure to coat my skin with Vaseline beforehand, and after I’d applied the stuff, carefully wiped off any excess on my skin with a baby wipe before it had the chance to stain. The thing is, this all sort of took time, and I’d forgotten to check what time it was when I put the dye on, so I figured I’d leave it more or less 10 minutes from when I’d finished using the baby wipes. What’s a few minutes more or less? I thought.

You may take this as the first piece of evidence that I am monumentally stupid.

I washed the dye out of my hair, maybe 15 minutes after putting it on, maybe 20, who knows. Anyway, I was in for a bit of a shock. Because it was BLACK.

I washed it a couple of times. It still appeared to be black, but then again, it was night time and the lighting wasn’t that good, so I went to bed and decided not to worry about it. My husband came home from work the next morning, thought, and after greeting me in his usual affectionate fashion, he said “Your hair is a little dark, isn’t it?”

Right. This was NOT good. I started looking up ways to wash out dark dye from hair, on the internet.

This is the second piece of evidence that I am monumentally stupid.

I tried baby shampoo, and Head and Shoulders, both of which are supposed to work. And when I say “tried”, I mean “I put them on my hair and left them for an hour and then rinsed and did it again.” The colour faded maybe a little. Not enough.

So I tried Fairy liquid. This is, for anybody who isn’t in England, a brand of dishwashing liquid. Lemon scented, in this case. With a little baby on the front of it, indicating, one would think, that it would not act as a sort of paint stripper on one’s hair.

I left it for an hour. I washed it out. Dark stuff came flooding out with the rinse water, so I immediately put some more on again. And left it.

We don’t even need any more evidence at this point, do we? Can we all just agree that I am REALLY, REALLY, FREAKING STUPID?!

When I was finished with my home chemistry lesson, my hair indeed was not black. Well, not at the roots it wasn’t. It was a sort of dull brown at the roots. The ends were still black. Worse, my hair was the consistency of ten-year-old hay. I tried three or four deep-conditioning treatments. They did nothing.

I looked like a witch.

In tears, on Wednesday, I went to my hairdresser. (Yes, I know. I should have done this first. We’ve all agreed already about my intellectual capacity.) He told me he could fix it. He also told me I was stupid. I didn’t care; I kissed him in gratitude.

Thursday morning—a mere 24 hours, mind you, before I had to go to the conference and be on a panel discussion and give a workshop— a team of three haircare professionals clustered around my poor abused head, performing emergency resuscitation. They gave it a bleach bath to strip all of the colour. They conditioned it. They put another colour on it and put me under a heat lamp. They put more conditioner on it. After two hours in the chair, my hair was a decent colour, it was glossy, it was soft, and I was considerably poorer.

It didn’t matter. I could go to the conference without wearing a hat. It was magic.

Dear blog readers: if I ever, and I mean EVER, mention colouring my hair again by myself, will you please, please, please come round to my house and physically restrain me?

More about the actual conference tomorrow.

Left: Hair dyed by Julie. Right: Hair dyed by professionals.