I thought this might provide a fascinating insight into my creative process.  Mostly it involves being in the world’s yellowest room, trying to read my own handwriting to find out what’s supposed to happen next. The yellow is even more horrid in person, but this is my kitchen and thus the kettle is but a jump to the left (along with the drawer containing the wherewithal to write myself motivatingly silly post-it notes).

The Brontes WentTo Woolworths, Rachel Ferguson. “Three years ago I was proposed to. I couldn’t accept the man, much as I liked him, because I was in love with Sherlock Holmes.” Where have you been all my life, book? Why were you not on the family bookshelves, filed under ‘Noel Streatfeild for grown-ups’, in between Cold Comfort Farm and I Capture The Castle? (I know why: because it’s been out of print for ages, and is newly reissued as part of a group from Bloomsbury – guess what they’ve called it – of neglected but beloved early C20th fiction. I want them all.) The Carne sisters Katrine, Deidre and Sheil spend their days accompanied by numerous colourful ‘friends’, many of whom they’ve never met – so when they encounter the ‘real’ Lord and Lady Toddington, will real life live up to the fiction, or destroy it? The moment where it begins to dawn exactly how the Brontes come in put a mile-wide smile on my face. A clever and very funny 1930s novel about families and fiction, which makes the reader entirely lose track of who is real and who is not (and not mind at all).

  UNICORNS!!  Only not really (before my editor expires).  It ought to read MERMAIDS!! too.    (Not really them either.)  I’m having proper fun with Project Poppy this week, even if I seem to have hit my intended halfway-point in terms of word count but not in terms of plot.  I don’t care: any day when I get to type ‘SIMEON’S GOLDEN SNOTRAG OF LOVE’ into my manuscript counts as a good ‘un.

  Icing Sinterklaas biscuits for St Nick’s Day (thank you Kirsten!); making parsnip, chilli & ginger soup (mmm); wishing I was home to see Small Person being an angel (awwww).