I hear advice, very often, about how writers should trust their instincts. How we shouldn’t follow the market, but write what we love because we should trust our instinct about what people would like to read. How we should take criticism but always with a pinch of salt, because we need to trust our instinct about what’s right for our stories.

This is good advice. At least, my instincts tell me it’s good advice. Writing and publishing are so very subjective that we need a life-saver of instinct to cling to, or else we’d flounder around in a sea of conflicting ideas. Well, more than we already do.

The thing is, I don’t really know if it’s completely true. Personally, sometimes my instincts are spot-on. And sometimes, they really really suck.

My instincts, for example, tell me that everything I write will be loads better with at least one penis joke in it. This is so self-evidently not true that I can’t help but regard my instincts with suspicion.

I’ve submitted at least three books that I actively hated when I pressed ‘send’…and every one of those three books has been called ‘your best yet’ by my editor at the time.* On the other hand, when I sent in my last book I absolutely loved every word of it…and my editor (quite rightly) gave me huge revisions.

Several times, I’ve come up with what I think is an absolutely brilliant idea for a story, only to have it shot down in flames by my agent. But then another idea is okay. Why? Why? For the love of God, why?!!?

My instincts do not tell me. They are too busy partying with the penis jokes.

On the other hand, I usually know instinctively when there’s something wrong with a scene or a plotline a conflict or a character, even if I can’t figure out why. It gets all tangled up and it doesn’t work.

Except, of course, when it does seem to work, and I totally love it, and only discover later on that it doesn’t.

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell says that truly effective instinctive people have trained themselves with knowledge and experience, so that their split-second decisions are often the most accurate. After eight years as a published author, I’d like to think that’s true; that my instincts are informed by what I’ve learned. But sometimes, I can’t help but think that while you should trust your instincts, you shouldn’t trust them too much. You should look around for knowledge and experience too. For good reasons to fall back on. Maybe this is why I’m an analytical writer as well as an impulsive one; I like to know why something feels right.

I’ve had a really good couple of writing weeks, and I really like what I’ve produced. I think it does exactly what I wanted it to do; I think it’s challenging me while playing to my strengths, and I am in love with the characters**. I feel that way, of course, until it comes time to let it out into the world. Then my instincts run off to party again.

What are your thoughts about your instincts?

*I like those books a lot better now, with distance. And no, I’m not going to say which ones they were.

**It doesn’t include any penis jokes, though. I wonder if maybe I should put some in?

I’ve been away from this blog since before Christmas. Very naughty. I’ve also been away from writing. And can I just say…it’s been marvellous?

But I’m back! With a puffin!

Happy new year everyone. A little bit late.

Nearly five years ago, Fecklet was born, and for his birthday party this year he wanted a cake shaped like Lightning McQueen.

Now last year this whole car-shaped cake thing didn’t turn out so well, so I had more than a little bit of trepidation. Nevertheless, as soon as I’d dropped Fecklet off at school this morning, I turned on Desert Island Discs and got baking.

Fecklet wanted a chocolate cake, but once I started measuring out, I realised we were nearly out of cocoa. So off I went, into the sleet, to find it. The first shop I went to didn’t have any, so I went to three other shops to find it. Three. None of them had cocoa. They had rose petals, they had kielbasa, they had Your Tattoo Magazine, but the basic ingredients for making a chocolate cake? Nah. Finally I went back to the first shop to get some dark chocolate to melt, and there, on the shelf: cocoa! Lots of it! Bourneville!

Either I missed it first time, or there was a magic cocoa fairy following me around.

So: to work. Last year, I followed the instructions on the bottle of Special Cake Release Fluid: brush lightly onto the tin; no flour or baking parchment needed. That didn’t work and the cake was a broken mess that had to be glued together with chocolate buttercream. So this year, I brushed that stuff on about half an inch thick, added baking parchment to the very bottom, and layered some flour on top of it for luck.

The car-shaped tin is shaped weirdly so the ends cook quickly and the middle never does. Despite my judicious use of tinfoil and baking powder, the cake burned on top, and wasn’t tall enough.

I was also quite frightened that it wouldn’t come out of the tin. But it did. Lesson learned: if you don’t want your cake to stick, use LOTS AND LOTS OF GREASE.

My friend Elizabeth came over for a visit in the afternoon and she offered invaluable assistance as to icing colours and distracting conversation, along with making the Earl Grey. She also advised me to prop the cake up on half a takeaway container from Wok On Wheels so I could use Oreos to make the tyres. Several batches of buttercream later, here’s what I came up with:

Here is a closeup of the Oreo wheels and the spoiler, which I made with bits of cut-off cake (Fecklet is very keen on spoilers):

And finally, here is my kitchen at the end.

Have you ever had a cheese string? You know, that processed cheese stuff that’s individually packaged for kids’ lunch boxes? Fecklet has some and I just tried one. They’re really really good. Just saying. You should try one. Don’t steal it from a kid or anything, but if you happen to be in the neighbourhood, pop round and I’ll give you a cheese string.

All in all, I’m having a pretty good week, having sold a short story and a novella…and it’s only Thursday! I’m also pimping myself a bit around the web, and in real life:

There’s a 75-word paragraph from my story ‘The Black Sheep’ on Paragraph Planet (it’s archived now, alas, but it was there!), and also an interview with me there.

My recipe for cranberry nut bread, and a giveaway of Getting Away With It, are on Chick Lit Central.

On Saturday 10th December, I’ll be signing copies of my books at the Local Author Fair at Reading Central Library, Abbey Square, Reading. The fair runs from 10 til 4 but I will probably only be there till 1.30 or so. I’ll have copies of my new hardback, The Summer of Living Dangerously, and also pretty much my entire backlist for sale, including my Mills & Boon stuff. There are lots of authors there so it’s a great place to pick up Christmas gifts.

On Sunday 11th December, I’ll be signing my books again, this time at Windsor Waterstones, on Peascod Street in Windsor. They’ll have my latest hardback, The Summer of Living Dangerously, plus Getting Away With It, Girl from Mars, and some of my others. That’ll be from around 11ish till 4ish.

I’ve done some little drawings for Christmas cards to give away at the signings, with the web address of my free Christmas read, ‘The Black Sheep’. I think he’s sort of cute. Though not as surprisingly delicious as a cheese string.

Click on his cute little miserable face to read the story.

Fecklet and I decorated our Christmas tree yesterday. I like to put it next to my grandparents’ menorah, because we are a multi-functional family when it comes to celebrating holidays.

What you can't quite see are the tiny toy animals Fecklet has hidden between the branches.

Any day that consists of spending time with a building full of Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer fans is bound to be brilliant, and when you throw in a bit of dancing, a bit of sex and some men in period uniform…

Well, it’s pretty much bliss.

For me, the day started with lugging a suitcase of books and historical costume from Reading to London, and then doing a quick change in the thankfully large and generously be-mirrored ladies’ room at the Royal Overseas League. Several of us were there helping each other button up and doing each other’s hair, including the lovely Christina Courtenay who, believe it or not, made her dress herself. This is Christina and me with Henriette Gyland, who was attired as a very handsome gentleman for the day.

I think it looks like she's pinching our bums. Shameless rake!

I chaired a panel with Nicola Cornick, Juliet Archer, and Beth Elliott to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Sense & Sensibility. Nicola knows a huge amount about the period and was able to offer some interesting links between Willoughby in the novel and the Earl of Craven. Juliet writes modern versions of Jane Austen’s novels and so she had some things to say about the characters and how they translated into modern sensibilities. And Beth traced the philosophical influences on the creation of two heroines, Elinor and Marianne.

In my research I was quite tickled to find that Austen had been rejected (for an early version of Pride and Prejudice) and she funded the publication of Sense & Sensibility, her first novel in print, herself. It was a success (selling out its first print run of 750 copies!) and was published anonymously, as “A Lady”.

The story goes that when Jane and her niece, Anna, saw the book in a circulating library, Anna commented that it must be rubbish with a title like that.

Modern romance writers can identify with all of this, I think!

It was a treat for me to dissect the text a little bit and to revel in its glorious structure. I love the way that Elinor and Marianne’s stories are nearly identical and how Austen deftly manipulates the similarities and differences to create irony and heighten the pacing.

Next, we heard Jennifer Kloester talking about her new biography of Georgette Heyer. I knew hardly anything about Heyer’s life so I was amazed to hear what a deft novelist she was, writing incredibly quickly—but also how she was plagued by self-doubt about her writing.

There were sessions on Georgian scents and what sounds like a hugely interesting session on Georgian sex, but I chose the active pursuits of Regency dancing and going for a Regency walk. Our guide Louise Allen was knowledgeable and fascinating (and the soldier kept on saluting passers-by!).

Outside the private London Library in St James's Square

There was a Waterloo tea featuring readings and cake, but I stayed at the Royal Overseas league to play Hazard (I’m rubbish at it), and the day was rounded off by a panel discussion about Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer, by author Jenny Haddon, Ebury Fiction Editor Gillian Green, Jennifer Kloester, historical author Joanna Fulford, Roy McMillan, producer at Naxos Audiobooks.

There are more photos on Liz Fenwick’s blog, but I will leave you with a photo of me gazing adoringly at Beau Brummel, whilst he gazes stonily into the distance.

Most inappropriate behaviour.

PS…If you’re in the area, I’m giving a talk at Wokingham Library at 8 pm on Thursday 20th October. Wokingham Library’s events are always lovely, so please come!

I’m really looking forward to Saturday, when I’ll be at the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s Regency Celebration at the Royal Overseas League. There’s going to be Regency dancing, talks on Georgian sex and Regency scents, a talk by Jennifer Kloester about her new Georgette Heyer autobiography, and walks around Regency London. (For some pictures, have a look at Jenny Haddon’s blog.)

It’s a Regency romance fan’s dream come true.

I’m dressing up, of course; I can’t sew, like the intrepid Christina Courtenay, so I’ve borrowed my long-suffering friend Ruth’s red bridesmaid dress again, and I’ve got a shawl to go with it. I’ll have to do something about my hair (Jan Jones is also worried about this problem) and the ostrich plume I wore the last time I dressed Regency is distinctively worse for wear, from sweeping under the arms of dancing gentlemen during the Duke of Kent’s Waltz.

Unlike the last time I wore the outfit, I will have several like-minded women to help do my dress up in the back, so I won’t have to ask some random cider-drinking smokers to help me. Which is a relief.

I’m also chairing a talk, with the brilliant Juliet Archer, Nicola Cornick, and Beth Elliott, on Sense & Sensibility, which is celebrating its 200th anniversary this year. In preparation, I’ve been rereading the book and also watching the film (what a hardship).

It’s going to be a fabulous day and I’m really looking forward to it.

Book signings are odd things. You sit (or stand) in a book shop and you wait for passing people to possibly be interested in your book, and/or you. Authors, who spend hours and hours alone with their own minds, often aren’t natural salespeople and it can be very disheartening to watch random strangers pick up your book and then reject it immediately, in front of you. They don’t mean to be cruel—they just want to buy a book that they like. But it’s a little stab in the heart every time.

Your book is your precious thing, your creation. But at book signings, sometimes you can feel as if you’re selling soap powder.

This is why, in general, I prefer to do author events, where I get to talk to readers who have bothered to specifically show up. It’s less, then, as if I’m selling soap powder and more as if I’m having a nice chat.

You have to get hyped up for a book signing. On Friday night, I went to a Jamie Oliver party at my friend’s house and oohed and ahhed over all the lovely and largely unnecessary cooking items whilst drinking wine, and then I was somehow persuaded to go to the Purple Turtle. If you live in Reading, you know that the Purple Turtle is a late-night drinking establishment which has a reputation for being loud and chaotic. I’m no stranger to the Turtle—I actually met my husband at the previous Turtle, which was in a now-demolished building—but I haven’t been there for years and I felt distinctly like The Old Person In The Room.

In fact, a young whippersnapper of about 20 approached us and asked us random questions, clearly as a dare to “go talk to that old lady over there.”

Anyway, this is all a long-winded way of saying that I was slightly worse for wear for my book signing in Windsor on Saturday. Fortunately, the staff at Windsor Waterstones are great. They had everything set up and the manager, Carol, is a whirlwind of bookselling goodness who knows her customers personally, and does a lot of events.

I had chocolate. I was prepared to approach customers, put a copy of my book in their hands, tell them I was signing copies if they were interested, and walk away. I was happy to accost people who were holding books that I love, and have a little chat about the book and recommend others—including, sometimes, mine. I talked to several young people who love to write stories. I gave out my card to readers, even if they didn’t feel like buying a book right now. I gave chocolate to smiling children and their parents.

I also answered queries about where the toilets were, and whether there were any lifts. I fielded questions such as “Where’s that book that has Sarah Jessica Parker in the movie?” (the woman didn’t believe me when I showed her because it didn’t have SJP on the cover) and “Where’s Katie Price’s latest novel?” I gave away chocolate to children who didn’t even thank me (!!) and whose parents didn’t even glance at my book (!!!). I smiled as graciously as I could manage when a very nice couple said, “I’m sorry, but I’ve never heard of you” and when an otherwise charming man said, “So how many of these do you sell, anyway?”

I got to sign a book for a woman who was buying it as a little gift to bring to her boyfriend’s mother when they visited her to tell her they were engaged. (“To Sarah’s future mother-in-law,” I wrote.) I signed one for a husband who was buying a stack of books for his pregnant wife to read before their baby came. I signed one for a mum who was cross with her daughter right now, but was keeping it for a present later on. I signed two copies of Girl from Mars for two girls who looked like exactly the sort of beautiful misfits I wrote about in the book.

So…not like selling soap powder. Not really, at all.

I’m looking through the proofs for my next paperback, THE SUMMER OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, and it’s extremely cool to see that the very pretty cover design carries through to the inside. Have a look at these lovely title pages!

Fecklet has started school full time, which is a good thing for both of us. He’s loving it, and I really need the time to catch up on work. On Tuesdays he stays late at school to do Lego Club. He mostly wanted to do Lego Club so he could destroy the things he made.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to pick out shoes to wear to my book signing at Waterstones in Windsor this Saturday. There’s a pair of fake crocodile brogues which are quite possibly the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. But I’m trying to resist. Also, my friend Michelle is having a Jamie Oliver party at her house the night before and though I have good intentions, I fear that I’ll end up drinking like seven bottles of wine and then spend my shoe money on tea towels and storage canisters.

Anyway, if you’re in the area, come to Windsor Waterstones on the afternoon of Saturday the 24th September. You can buy a book if you want, but you can also just taunt me for being hungover.

I will have chocolate.

If you’re a fan of Jane Austen or Regency romance, or if you just like seeing men in tight breeches and women in gorgeous frocks, check out the Regency Celebration that’s happening next month in London.

This event will be a celebration of Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer and the books they have influenced. It coincides with the launch of a new biography of Georgette Heyer, written by Dr Jennifer Kloester, and 2011 also happens to be the bi-centenary of the publication of Jane Austen’s “Sense & Sensibility” – both perfect excuses for a Regency themed day!

• Georgette Heyer, Her Life and Writing – Talk by Dr Jennifer Kloester
• Sense & Sensibility: The Things You Didn’t Know – Panel discussion by Amanda Grange, Juliet Archer, Nicola Cornick and Julie Cohen
• Austen & Heyer – Were they better than they thought they were? Panel discussion
• The Celestial Bed: Sex and the Georgians – Talk and panel discussion
• Regency Scents: Odours and Malodours – Louise Allen and Christina Courtenay “sniff-and-tell”
• Regency Clothing – Jane Walton demonstrates the fashions of the day
• Regency Dancing – Mr and Mrs Ellis Rogers take us through the steps
• Parlour Games – Learn how to play Whist, Piquet, Vingt et Un or Loo
• Regency Walk – Guided tour of St James’s
• Afternoon Tea, with the chance to attend a special Waterloo Tea

To book, please visit the RNA website, or you can visit the event page on Facebook. You can also follow @RNARegencyDay on Twitter.

I’ll be there, speaking about Sense & Sensibility, promoting The Summer of Living Dangerously, and perhaps dressed like this…

So when I got back from the US, I noticed that my beloved iMac was running slowly. It wouldn’t go to sleep, and it kept on hanging. And it was really, really noisy, too. The fan would go crazy whenever I tried to do something complicated, like, say, a Google search or listening to the radio.

It’s over five years old, and I was pretty sure that this was the beginning of the end of the line. Still, though, I brought it to the brand-new local Apple store, to talk to one of the techs there. I carried it in in a canvas bag, and heaved it up onto the counter. Next to the paper-slim iPads and laptops, it looked like a large, ungainly, elderly (yet still quite beautiful) white elephant.

“That’s what we call ‘vintage’,” said the tech guy. “We can’t get the parts for those any more.”

I compared my iMac with my son, who sat beside me at the counter, playing a Lightning McQueen game. My son is only a few months younger than my iMac. He is in no way “vintage”.

I described my problem, and the tech guy shook his head. “Looks like your hard drive is failing,” he said. “Best thing to do is buy a new computer. If you want to look into servicing it and squeeze a few more months’ worth out of it, here are some numbers to call.”

I went home feeling sad and broke. But I called the Apple service guy, who said that if my iMac had been totally reliable for the past 5 years, it made good sense to put a new hard drive in it to get a couple more years’ worth of use, at a cost of something just over 15% of a new computer. If I did it myself, it would cost something like 5% of a new computer.

That made me feel better. I had options.

After putting down the phone, I decided that since I had the iMac disconnected already, I’d might as well open up the back of it and give it a bit of a hoover. These things do tend to suck dust up through the fan vents. So I did. There was a lot of dust in there.

When I started it back up…well, you can guess what happened. My computer is now nearly silent. It goes to sleep at the touch of a button. I no longer get the spinning wheel on Google searches.

Net cost? Zero pounds and zero pence.

Cleanliness is next to computer geniusness, that’s what I always say.

Have you found low-tech solutions to your high-tech problems?

Though I grew up in Maine, my years in England have made me pretty much a City Person. This all gets reversed when I come back to Maine for holiday. As you can see, I go native, wearing cutoffs and no shoes and shooting potato guns etc.

Here are a few things that have been happening lately, mostly to do with wildlife:

A seagull leapt onto our table at Old Orchard Beach and stole the Fecklet’s pizza.

Dad and I went up to the Ellis Pond General Store to play Wednesday night cribbage. Mom told me before we left, “It doesn’t matter if you win. Just have fun. And be mean.” and my partner and I totally won every game. Five out of five. Dad came in second. This is the same day that Mom won first prize for bridge. It was a Cohen family card triumph!

I saw a crayfish for the first time ever in the lake.

We’ve caught a lot of frogs.

Fecklet and Grandma have a new game: knocking Japanese beetles off the rose bush into a dish of soapy water, where they drown. They find this endlessly fascinating. The roses are still pretty much eaten, and the beetles are breeding like crazy, so their efforts are in vain, but Fecklet and Grandma don’t seem to mind.

Instead of garages, Fecklet has started building bird hides for his cars.

I have to travel for 25 minutes to get an internet connection so I’m only checking emails and Twitter once every couple of days.

Instead of looking at a thick book and thinking, “Man, I’d love to read that but I don’t have time”, I’ve thought, “Excellent!” I’m reading EAST OF EDEN right now and can’t put it down.

We tried to canoe up the inlet but it was blocked by a beaver dam. Rock God and I thought this was incredible, but Fecklet was seriously put out. He repeatedly and loudly wished the beavers would live somewhere else, so that he could do some more canoeing.

More notes from the wilderness later…