When I wrote my first post on this blog, my plan was to use it as a kind of writing journal for myself, and to update it every two weeks. I see now that it is months since I last wrote on it.
This is primarily for 2 reasons:
1) I seem to get the closest insights into my own writing life at times when it is absolutely inconvenient to write them down or type them.
2) I have spent the last few months determinedly getting to the end of the 5th Seeker Book, 'The House of Lamentations'. The book's due out next July (2020) and my deadline was 31st October. I had had a year to write the book - my shortest deadline yet, and there were times just before the Summer when I thought I wouldn't make it, but then from July to September some invisible wand waved over me and by last week I found that I had redrafted and proof-read with 9 days to spare. Of course, there was no invisible wand - it was a case of getting my head down and doing it. I have hardly been on my bike (my favourite leisure activity) for months, scarcely a weed was pulled from the garden all summer, and my husband took over most of the cooking duties at weekends and holidays.
The book is set in Bruges in 1658, and I think what really gave me the impetus over the last few months is the fact that I was able to visit Bruges for a few days in July. Prior to that, I'd been writing as if partly blind-folded, with a palpable sense of unease that I was writing about a place I had never seen. Historical novelists, though, are always writing about places they have never seen. Even if we happen to live in the C21st incarnation of a town we are writing about in the C17th, we have to imagine our way back through the centuries to what that town might have been like then. Like Oxford and York, which feature in other Seeker books, Bruges is astonishingly well-preserved. My favourite part of the trip was probably the day we cycled along the canal path to the nearby town of Damme, which is firmly in my top 5 of 'wonderful places I have been', and features in the final, and I hope, dramatic chapter of the book.
When I am deep in the dark depths of a book, and the deadline but a distant dream, I always tell myself that when it is finished, I will weed the garden, tidy the house, see friends, get back on my bike, pay proper attention to what passes for my social media presence! What usually happens is that after 2 days (maximum), I am agitating to get back in the study and get on with the next book.
And so it is this time around, although with an added diversion. 2 days after submitting 'The House of Lamentations', I headed down to London for the CWA awards. 'Destroying Angel', the 3rd Seeker book, was on the short-list for the Historical Dagger. There was a frock, there were nice shoes, there was champagne and a sparkling dinner ( I was seated between my editor, Jane Wood, and the literary agent Patrick Walsh who turned out to be very entertaining company). What I had genuinely not expected was to win. But I did. I was so surprised and very, very happy. Evenings like that are golden times, the kind to cherish at the inevitable times when things aren't going so well.
But now back home, and to work. The study is tidier than it has ever been, the charity shop pile is packed, if not yet in the car, the leaves have been swept from the drive. The blog post is nearly written! What happens next is that I will begin work on my new project, a move away, for now, from the C17th and into the early C19th. The book - working title 'The Cromarty Circulating Library' - will be set not in faraway London, or Bruges, or even York, but in a small town at the tip of the Black Isle. It is about 20 miles away from my house, and it is not unknown for me to be able to reach it by bike. In the tidy-up of the study I found from a notebook that I've been jotting down ideas for this project for at least two and a half years. It's a bit of a leap of faith to be moving forward two centuries, but I'm very excited. Who knows how it will turn out? I don't want to abandon Damian Seeker altogether - I just feel like he and I need a bit of a break from each other. Watch this space.

P.S. To the lady who sent me a message last week (or the week before) about writing and planning and asking if I have a website (sorry, no), please try again - I was in the middle of everything when your message arrived and it seems to have disappeared!