So, I survived another half term and here comes yet another galloping up on us for Easter, before I’ve had chance to draw breath, clean behind the fridge or paint my toenails!

I wrote next to nothing last half term and instead went shopping with my girls, had girlie hair appointments, sleepovers (my daughters, not me!) and bizarrely a trip to the local science museum, as my eldest daughter has a brain shaped like her dad’s and loves science! Personally I couldn’t understand a bit of it, but there you go!

Although I wrote nothing I still felt connected to the writing side of me all that week - I came second in The Pages short story competition again.

But since then it’s been back to school and back to writing. I’m working on my second novel, and it’s starting to come together a bit now. After my first book was published people kept asking me how long it takes to write a novel. I was thinking about that this morning and the answer is – a long time!

I was remembering the moment the spark of an idea first came to me, which has since become the novel I’m writing now, and that moment was a weekend away for my tenth wedding anniversary. I’ve now been married nearly thirteen years and the book is only in its first draft, so if you want to take the book from first being born to finish I’d say it takes about 5 years. Of course that’s not five years of sitting there everyday writing, but it is five years of thinking about the story.

People gasp when I say my first book took about 2 years to write, as if they think I knocked it up one spare afternoon, but actually it took a lot longer than that. It began way back in the nineties, before I had children, and considering my eldest daughter is now ten, that’s quite a long time! I just don’t think they’d believe me if I told them the truth!

But, if my first book took ten years, and my second will have taken about five years, then there’s hope, I suppose, that my next one will take two and a half years etc etc, until I will finally reach the stage where I’m knocking a book out in a spare afternoon…..

…..let’s hope not, eh?