I spent New Years with my closest friends in Cheshire, which was great fun (a Portuguese all-you-can-eat buffet and a man making balloon animals, what more could you ask for?), but we came home to hear that my granddad had passed away. It was terribly sad for all the family, but especially my mum who was particularly close to him, so after the funeral, I took her to Champneys spa which was a great tonic for my mum. She even managed to have a few laughs when we discovered we were there at the same time as Gazza! He seemed to be everywhere we went (especially red-faced in the pool, pic above), so we began to suspect he was stalking us. It was lovely to get away for a few days, even if I did have to take my laptop, with the deadline for Original Sin looming. I think this book was a little harder to finish, possibly because most of it is set in New York. It’s a city I know very well, but when you live in England, it’s not like you can just nip out and check you’ve got the correct description of a brownstone townhouse in the Village… Plus, I thought ‘OS’ was going to be my shortest book but somehow the characters seem to take on a life of their own and it ended up being my longest!
Caught the first few days of Spring (well, a bit of sunshine) at Kew Gardens, where the bluebells were popping up everywhere – who says global warming can’t be romantic?
What else…? Well it was great fun catching up with authors Sasha Blake and Jo Rees for a shoot for Marie Claire magazine (see the press section). Although people probably expect authors writing in the same genre to be deadly rivals (hey, not a bad idea for a novel…), lots of us are good friends. The life of a novelist can be quite a solitary one unless you use it as a good excuse for a long lunch and cocktails, of course. Although since I had a baby, my liver – the traitor – has decided to give up alcohol, so a few sips of Sauvignon Blanc require a lie-down. Hey, come to think of it, maybe my fellow authors are trying to poison me…
