The Next Big Thing comes to Wine Women and Wordplay

Please note this is A Big Thing, not actually MY Big Thing… (It’s the CSIRO Radio Telescope at Parkes, Australia. A favourite Big Thing)

I’m delighted to be part of The Next Big Thing Blog Hop. I’ve been asked to answer ten questions about what I’m working on and then tag other authors to do the same.

Some of these questions were easy and some were trickier, but it was fun to do! I’m quite excited to talk about this novel as it’s a rewrite of the first novel I ever wrote and I’m really looking forward to see how the transformation works out.  I can’t wait to give it to my stalwart beta reader, who has read every word I have ever written, and see how she likes it!

To continue the ‘hop’ you can follow the links at the bottom of this post.  I hope you like reading about MY next big thing (even if it’s not the world’s).  If you have questions, please ask, happy to answer.  If you are a reviewer and interested in receiving an ARC when it comes out I’d be very happy to hear from you. Just drop me a note in the comments or on the contact form.

1: What is the working title of your book?

Playing by the Rules

2: Where did the idea come from for the book?

A scene popped into my head one day; two best friends discussing the best way to get over a dumping.  I wrote that scene many years ago now and it sat in a drawer (literally, a filing cabinet drawer) for many years until I dragged it out and started thinking about how these two friends had got to this scene and where they would go from there.

3: What genre does your book come under?

Fun, flirty, contemporary romance.

Wednesday Work In Progress: Editing

Today I am having another new experience: I am going through edits from a real live working editor.

If you are multi-published this experience is about as familiar as lunch, but it’s new for me and I’m (mostly) enjoying it.

Most of the edits I agree with.  Some are simple matters of house style, or minor punctuation things that aren’t worth even discussing.  It’s a ‘you say po-tay-to, I say po-tah-to’ thing and one just reads, shrugs, and skips on.

Some are pick-ups of things which I didn’t notice, which are really valuable and show the importance of fresh eyes.  Word repetition, for example, is something I try to keep an eye on, but the copyeditor has flagged a couple of places where I have used the same word in adjacent sentences without noticing, sometimes because it means different things in the different context.

Wednesday WIP: the perils of research

For those who aren’t up (or is it down?) with writerly abbreviations, a WIP is a Work In Progress.  I have a couple on the boil at the moment, along with several on the proverbial back burner, where they can just stay until these others are finished!

For one of the current ones, I had to do some research on key logging software.

I knew about key loggers in the vaguest sense from warnings I have received about hackers.  They are programs that the sneaky hacker tries to load onto your computer to track what keys you hit, with the aim of finding the strings of keystrokes that are passwords.  Which they then use to steal your money, one imagines.

But I had no idea that you could go out and buy the software, quite legally.