For Honey Trap, out this July:

Gorgeous, isn’t it?

Here’s the blurb:

Sophie Tennant is used to sticky situations…

Will there be a sweet ending–or a sting in the tale?

Fecklet and I were in the Lake District visiting with Anna this past weekend, which was great. She has four cats and was very tolerant of my boy running around after them squealing “KITTY!!!!!” She was also tolerant of his favourite game, which was “Remove Fruit From Fruit Basket, Take One Bite Out Of It (Even The Lemons) And Put It Either Through The Cat Flap Or Under The Grill.”

One of my favourite moments was when Fecklet lingered, sucking his thumb, outside the room where Anna’s husband was watching football, wanting to go in and be blokey, but too shy.

Anyway I am hard at work on proofs of Honey Trap, which is out in July. I so, so seriously love the hero of this one. He’s an ex-alcoholic, formerly serially adulterous, ex-rock star. He is sexy as hell. Even reading the proofs with a pencil in my hand is getting me hot and bothered. Oh, baby.

Hooray, I just found out that Romantic Times has given my February US release, HIS FOR THE TAKING, four stars!

(This is the book formerly known as Driving Him Wild.)

I had a brilliant Christmas. It is so much fun to give toys to a little kid. We left out cake and a drink for Santa and a carrot for Rudolph and everything. Fecklet ate everything in sight, as did we.

I hope yours was just as good.

Now I’m back to work, hard on revisions for Honey Trap. I’ve added two new chapters to the beginning, in order to deepen the heroine’s character. I think I have about five more new chapters to add, plus layering in information elsewhere. Work work work work.

Well, my agent liked Honey Trap. So much so that she suggested no revisions (I nearly fell down with shock as this has NEVER happened to me) and I was able to send the ms straight off to my editor. I expect revisions from her, of course.

Fecklet has expanded his sock obsession to also include his parents’ feet, which he will ambush and attack with hoots of excitement.

On the advice of my critique partners, have revised two of the last chapters and rewritten the final one. I like it much better, though I’m not 100% sure of the last paragraph. It revisits the first time the hero and heroine meet, but will a reader remember that?

Anyway, I’m going to bed.

After my first page thread on eHarlequin, and all the crits I’ve done on the poor people taking my classes, I guess it’s time to post my first page and let people have at it. Fiona mentioned doing this herself with the Novel Racers, so if she does, maybe she’ll put a link in the comments.

The idea is that your first page should be a real hook into your book, and should give a clue as to what the main conflict is going to be right away. It should be tight, it should be exciting, and it should be the best you can make it.

So here it is…the first page of Honey Trap.

Any crits welcome, or if you think it works, that’s welcome too. I’ll post in the comments a bit later, explaining why I made the choices I did.

*

Please, at least let him be tall.

Sophie Tennant stood inside the doorway of the bar, scanning the room. She’d never seen her date in real life, but she knew he was brown-eyed, brown-haired, slightly built, and a scumbag.

Also, to her relief, not an early bird. She smoothed down her red dress and rubbed her lips together to make sure her red lipstick was still fresh, both actions unnecessary because she knew she was wrinkle-free and she’d put on the lipstick in her car five minutes ago, after adjusting the adhesive tape beneath her bra. Sophie went to the bar, ordered a tonic water with ice and a slice, and brought it to her preferred table in the corner, facing the door with the light behind her.

It was the third time this month she’d been in Bar 42 and she was beginning to wonder if the bar staff thought she was desperate, a hooker, or both. She didn’t like to be noticed and would have preferred to go somewhere else this time, but Keith had suggested it in his text.

It was a good location, anyway: not too dark, not too light, and just busy enough. Sophie’d had bad experiences with noisy crowded pubs before, hours of work down the drain because some idiot beside her was talking too loudly. And the less she thought about what had happened in the unlit car park of that country pub two years ago, the better.

Okay, have nearly read through the entire thing now and it doesn’t suck too bad.

Because this story is structured around a rock band on tour, I’ve written out where each show is and what happens around it on index cards, with green for gig dates and pink for days off. This shows me that my three-week tour has taken about twelve days. So I need to a) write one or two scenes to cover a few days, and b) space the events out a little bit.

Also I notice that my band have played Leeds twice. Lucky Leeds.

Other than that, the revisions have been quite minor, which is always a little worrying, especially as I had no clue what I was doing for most of this book.

Oh well onwards and upwards, and tomorrow is the launch of a cool new website, so please come back and check.

Well, I have finished my first draft, and my agent wants to see the ms when she comes back from Frankfurt. So I’ve got a week to get it into shape.

Yesterday I printed out half of it. I tried to print out the whole thing, but for some reason my printer stopped jobs halfway through and when I started them again, it began all over again on page 1, and I didn’t notice for ages. So I have two copies of the first half of the book. Today I’ll get it together and print the second half on the back of the first half.

Fecklet went to his child minder yesterday so I got through about the first third of the book, editing on paper. I had to cut a lot of the first chapter for pace (always happens). I’m also creating a timeline so I can fix any continuity problems, and making notes about research details to fill in, extra bits I want to add, and the names of characters.

I always forget minor characters’ names as I write, so instead of wasting a lot of time checking I usually either type XXX or I make up a whole new name. In this ms, Irene Martin transformed to Penelope Brandon halfway through, and by the end was Catherine Birkbeck. Don’t ask me how. Often, too, I name several characters the same thing, so I end up with three different Garys or something (for some reason I like to name people Gary).

Usually, too, I’ll try to merge secondary characters if I can in revisions, because it makes everything less confusing.

A lot of the time I know a whole lot more about characters, particularly important secondary characters, by the time I’ve finished the book so a lot of the initial revisions are adding those details nearer the front.

Anyway, I plan to keep on doing my read-through in stolen hours over the weekend (and, as often as possible, in bed because I’ve had not much sleep for the past few weeks).

What are your plans?

I have decided that because of the crows weighing down my shoulders, and the fact that my heroine is an aromatherapist, it is necessary for me to book myself a full-body aromatherapy massage as soon as possible.

It’s research.

Back from a very intense and rewarding course with a truly excellent group of people, and now I am trying to write like the wind. I need to finish the first draft more or less in the next two weeks, especially as a few days away from it have given me some perspective on the huge amount of work I will need to do to revise it.

It’s nice to get back to my hero Dominick, who can’t stop thinking about sex now that he’s had it for the first time in two years. He wants to bang his head against a wall. I am mostly laughing at him.

Meanwhile, the heroine is about to call the police after receiving a death threat in ketchup. Isn’t fiction fun?

I’m doing a Q&A over on eHarlequin about tightening your first page, and there have been some questions about how to deal with backstory. I thought I’d post this as an example of how backstory can be implied rather than stated or told to the reader, through ramping up conflict between your characters.

This is from Honey Trap, my wip (which will be out next April), and although it’s not on the first page, it’s the first meeting between the heroine and the hero for five years.

He was tall, even taller up on the stage, and he didn’t bother to take his guitar strap off his shoulder when he stormed down from the stage and across the club to where Sophie was standing, her heart pounding, her stomach sinking, barely able to breathe.

“That’s not what it looked like last time we met.” Sophie smiled at him sweetly and saw anger leap in his eyes. Something answering leapt within her.

You know that small shoot of an idea? I haven’t even used it yet–writing what leads up to it has given me an entire chapter of good stuff.

Tomorrow I post a photo of Hugh Jackman to celebrate The Pink Heart Society’s first birthday.