She'll be right mate...

Hey there peeps. Been absent a while as I have scurried around packing my valise for my imminent departure. And doing those little necessaries like getting the dog (and myself) groomed, and arranging flights hither and thither, and celebrating wedding anniversaries, and arranging payments of this and enrolments into that. I am distracted and feeling somewhat apprehensive and sleep and I are not on the best of terms at the moment. My mind is seething I tell you. I have to buy some extra school uniform items for manchild, and pay university fees for the girls and check that a book has reached a destination and post another and fit in some last minute physio so I can wrestle valises and book laden boxes and should I wear my Doc Martens on the plane and what will it be like while I am away. I am embracing my impending sense of dislocation and separation from my family as the perfect preparation for the story I intend to write. And I find it all so weird that so much of my year is already organised. How do people who are booked up for events three years in advance get their heads around it? I am excited by it all but I just hope I've printed off the right info and have the right gear packed now for the things I will be up to in August.

In the meantime, as I am unable to focus on anything that isn't to do with my preparation, here is a rather juicy link for those of you writing longer fiction. I confess to organising my chapters on a rather organic basis (a.k.a making it up as I go along) but this advice on what a chapter should be achieving from Lynn Price, editor at Behler Publications is worth a read.

And if you, like me, loved the Flambards series as a teen reader, you might be pleased to see that author KM Peyton has been awarded an MBE. I enjoyed the insight into the uneasy transition from horses to cars, the birth of aviation and it's role in the Great War, and the changes to the British rural idyll, and as a teen I adored the passion of all the characters for each other and for their respective ways of life. The books would have been nothing without them. And the original trilogy, along with series like the Little House on the Prairie books have had a big influence on the way I write my own historical novels now.