News on the Next Book

Who wouldn't be inspired? Majorca rocks...

So…almost a year after my first novel, Thank You For The Music, was accepted by Tirgearr Publishing, and just five months after its publication, I’ve signed a contract for my next novel.

Did I think it would be different? Did I think I might be blasé about it? (“Hmm…oh, yes. Just another contract, nothing to fuss about.”) No, I didn’t. It doesn’t feel quite the same because, let’s be honest, NOTHING beats the buzz of first understanding that you’re going to be published except for that moment when you actually are. But oh, it still feels good.

I’ll tell you a little about this one, just as a teaser. No Time Like Now is, like Thank You For The Music before it, set in the north east of Majorca, this time just outside the town of Puerto Pollensa. Unlike TYFTM it’s romantic suspense rather than plain romance. Our heroine is a housekeeper at a university field centre but when a researcher turns up for a month’s fieldwork, her cosy life is disrupted…because he’s her old flame and the two of them broke up very, very nastily some years before.

It brings together a lot of the things I love. Romantic suspense fiction is the first of them. I still have all my old Mary Stewart books, tattered and read to bits. (Maybe I should think about replacing them.) I like to read and write in all sorts of genres but Mary Stewart caught my attention early (The Moon Spinners is the first I read, and still my favourite) with her exotic locations and desperate situations.

Majorca is the second, happily fulfilling the requirement for an exotic location while giving me the excuse to justify a holiday with the writer’s claim of ‘collecting material’. I have good ideas there, usually when I’m sitting in the sun and staring across the Mediterranean, too idle to do anything but let my imagination run wild in those otherwise barren hours between the afternoon ice cream and the pre-dinner drinks.

The third is rocks. Geography, geology, earth science…whatever. And Majorca has lots of rocks. It has lots of caves, too, and lots of secret places (some of which I’ve invented but I’ll talk about that at a later date). Add that to the mix and see what you get.

So it’s a sort of new venture for me. I just hope, when it comes out, that you like it.