So far, I've managed to complete 30,000 words of my new novel, and I've sent this 'partial' off to the Romantic Novelists Association New Writers Scheme, a wonderful service that's provided me with a life-line over the past few years, along with Birkbeck College's creative writing classes and another writing class at the lovely Mary Ward Centre. Still no sign of an agent who wants to take on my first novel, 'The Practical Woman's Guide to Living with the Undead', so I'm cutting my losses and forging ahead with the new book this autumn.
Once again, I'm writing a book with a paranormal theme, although this time, it's witchcraft, not vampires. The first chapter begins on a lonely moorland, where a young girl, Jeanie Gowdie, has been taken to pray before a stone, known as the witch-stone... It's all very menacing at first , as her mad Presbyterian father, the owner of the cheerless Knox Hill Guest House, insists that she must never repeat the sins of the ungodly women who were once 'justly punished' in front of the stone, but then Jeanie remembers the words of her wise, hedge-witch grandmother, "Your father's beliefs have as much worth as a blast of gas from a cow's backside" and, after that, she recovers her equilibrium.....
