I’m afraid it was indeed too much to ask that A Whirlwind Engagement wrote itself like the last book … yes, I am back to sighing and struggling!  This is my 35th book and you’d really think that writing would be getting easier, not more difficult.  The first draft was very skimpy, which means that I don’t have nearly as much to go on now that I am (supposedly) writing the version to be submitted by the end of September.  

So far I have done five and a half chapters – exactly half.  It was my birthday last Wednesday, and I awarded myself a day off, although I didn’t deserve it all, and consequently lost the little momentum I had built up.  This was very bad, and matters were made worse when I decided to have a dinner party last night.  I have yet to master the art of simple entertaining.  By the time I have pored over my recipes, planned an over-elaborate menu (which generally involves buying at least one new piece of cooking equipment), shopped and spent a minimum of two days cooking and one day recovering, I have wasted nearly a week.  
Next week isn’t looking much more productive.  I am going to London on Tuesday, and will be meeting up with my fellow Harlequin Mills & Boon authors for an Authors’ Day on Wednesday, so am telling myself that this will be a justifiable diversion from writing.  (Haven’t yet thought up a plausible reason to explain why I won’t be home until Friday, but perhaps one will come to me – if in doubt, I can always file it mentally under that useful category “research”!)  And the week after that will be taken up with my parents’ golden wedding anniversary – am not at all sure when the remaining five and a half chapters are actually going to be written ….

Unusually, I have a very clear idea about the last three chapters, but am less certain about the intervening two, which could be a bit of a problem.  However, things perked up on the plot front when I decided to take the hero and heroine to the Seychelles on a corporate jaunt which will bear an uncanny resemblance to the one I went on in January, right down the rain!   I am quite looking forward to writing those chapters, so if I can just get through to the end of Chapter 7 I should be OK.  I think I worked out I could allow myself a day and a half per chapter – otherwise I will be doing some grovelling to my editor!