Here it is. My long promised blog site.
And yes, I know.
It’s somewhat… delayed.
I do have reasons for this, my own ineptitude where ‘website design’ is concerned being the primary. Strange how I can shop brilliantly on the internet while discussing Star Wars meta and feminist issues on Twitter, all the while uploading images to Instagram, and yet the thought of actually having my own website leaves me terrified. I thought I was technology savvy, but there you go. Even now I’m sitting here with my grape smoothie (I’m in the café of my gym wearing yoga leggings, yet to decide if I will actually be doing any yoga today) wondering if I am getting this right.
And then there are the secondary reasons for this delay, the things I will simply list under a wide heading of ‘life’. My children, my work, my obligations, and the desire to be more than a passing acquaintance to my husband. You know what I mean. ‘Life’.
When I was younger, I had this image in my mind of what being an author would be. I always wanted to be a romance novelist, and even now, if I sit down to write something ‘non-romantic’ a love story will creep in anyway. So I thought I would be like Barbara Cartland, dressed head to toe in baby-pink and sipping a chilled white wine while writing at my desk, my handwriting a beautiful cursive.
Well, I’m no Barbara Cartland, and my handwriting is a terrible scrawl that even my son’s year 2 teacher frowns at. I tend to write in long stretches either very early in the morning or late at night, typing furiously on my laptop, surrounded by either piles of washing or children’s toys or school projects. Sometimes I’ll write with a child under the crook of one arm, while Teen Titans Go! or Scooby-Doo or Frozen or Little Einstein’s plays in the background. I’ll have a mug of lukewarm decaf coffee or Liquorice Tea in hand, because I’m not a great drinker, and can only have one or two glasses before I feel fuzzy-headed and lose all productivity.
So I’m not the image of what I thought an author would be. And one night, while I was lamenting this fact, one of my friends reminded me that no one really knows what a romance ‘author’ looks like because there is no definitive image of one. Cartland, Hibbert, Muskett, Quinn, Laurens, Mathers, McNaught and all the other great names of romance were or are very different people with very different lives.
So this blog, I hope, will let you see a little of mine.
I’m hoping to share something fairly lovely with you all tomorrow… so hope to see you then.
Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton