Fiona

Love Hunt is out in paperback this week, hooray, so I’m crossing everything that it will get crammed into lots of suitcases and hand luggage as it heads out on holiday throughout the summer. It’s a big slice of escapism, with a rollicking, romping plot and plenty of naughty goings-on in the Cotswolds to keep those pages turning as tans deepen. Trudy Dew is a character especially close to my heart, and as my last true ‘Lodes’ novel – at least for now – I wanted to leave the series, and Trudy, with the most fabulous of loved-up endings.

However, Rory and Faith from Love Hunt certainly feature in my most recent book which comes out early next year, along with Tash and Hugo Beauchamp from French Relations/Well Groomed, and a host of badly behaved event riders, horses, children, dogs and at least one WAG in tight breeches. And the book now has a title, ‘KISS AND TELL’ which I love. The manuscript is being copy-edited as I write, so all those endless rewrites have finally tightened every plot twist and turn and it’s almost ready to roll.

All of which means that I’m now making a start on my next book, which is just the best fun for a writer; this is the time where one gets to think up the names of the characters and start to colour them in, imagining how they look, speak and behave, plotting out their back stories and most importantly working out exactly how they’re going to spend several hundred pages falling in and out of love, grappling with misunderstandings and high jinx and racing towards that big, feel-good finale. I’ve now written a synopsis and started to draft out the first few chapters in detail, and want to make this one really up-beat and fun, with a heroine we can all relate to. It’s set between London and the north Devon coast, so I’ll soon be on the research trail revisiting old city haunts along with the coastline and villages around the Hartland Peninsula, one of the most beautiful places I know. This week, I couldn’t resist making a start on Chapter 1, and am happy to report that it’s flying along already (including two thousand words added on the Taunton-Paddington train yesterday). My heroine has just been set a romantic challenge that is impossible to resist; I can't wait to get back to it and start her on the quest.

Letting go of Kiss and Tell has been tough because I have been so totally immersed in it for so long, but I’m happy to report that the best antidote to that is a brand new beginning, and this one looks set to be tremendous pleasure to write.

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