Money for nothing and your chick(lit) for free*

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First, apologies to Dire Straights for badly adapting their fine song. Second, apologies to all of you who now have those lyrics running around your head...

There's less than one month to go till the official launch of The Twelve Days to Christmas, and I want to say thank you to everyone who has supported my writing career over the past decade.

We go together like peanut butter and jelly

I was just passing the local school on my way back from a jog. All right, all right, I didn't jog the whole way, but that's not the point.

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I was passing the school, like I said. The school children were outside, jogging around the playground. As I got close I heard one boy say, with obvious concern: "Come on, he's going to shout at you if you don't hurry up."

Time to take off the training wheels?

In a little while I'll start writing my 8th book. This is always the most exciting time in the writing process for me. The characters are new and I don't yet know how they'll behave. The storyline and settings are fresh, full of surprises that I can't yet anticipate.

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When I wrote my very first book, I did it without creating an outline first. I wrote and I wrote, and I wrote. When I finished, I set about writing the synopsis... and realised that I'd written an entire novel with no storyline. It meandered along, with some lovely characters in an intriguing setting, but there was no overarching story, nothing to make readers need to know what happened next.