Month: October 2012

I had a really productive start to the week, finishing the bones of the sequel to the Merciful Dark, which is going to be called “The Falling Dark”. Unfortunately everything is not going so well for Lily – she gets what she wants but at what price? I feel sort of mean, making a character go through all this stuff, but not being Alexander McCall Smith, I can’t write lovely stories about nice people and make it interesting! I seriously don’t know how he does it.
The latter part of the week was much less productive on the writing front, though I did clean out and rearrange my pantry. I’ve also bought CHRISTMAS decorations, even though it’s only OCTOBER. I’m starting to worry myself. At this rate I’ll be vaccuming the grass for fun in a month (rather than to clean the broken glass up as I did a few weeks ago). Today I have the choice between writing or repainting a chest of drawers or going to Bunnings and shopping for hardware I don’t need. Hmm…procrastination is becoming a form of art.

To spice things up and see if anyone is reading: if you’d like a character named after you in the next book, or want to pitch a character, let me know in the comments section and I’ll see what I can do!

About two months ago, I reached a cross-road: on the one hand I really, really wanted to be an author whose novels were read and enjoyed by more than friends and family, on the other hand I also wanted to make cakes, to be eaten and enjoyed by more than friends and family. On the writing side, I had two finished novels and had three in various stages of completion, but my kick-assed agent despaired of being able to sell my books, given the current state of publishing. On the cake side, I had more requests than I could possibly handle, possibly due to my inability to accurately account for the cost of making them and selling them at a steal.

I decided to do what any some-what sane mother would do – I would do both, and see where it took me. So far so good – book 1 is doing okay and cake orders are flowing in, managable because I have a fab cake-making partner in Natasha, whose creativity and wine-drinking ability might possibly exceed my own (we are still working on finding the limits of both).

Cheers! (because the kids are asleep and I’m on my cheeky 3rd glass!)

Lucy x