Diary
For anyone wondering if I’m still alive. I am. And huge apologies for the fact that it’s been so long since the last entry. You would be entitled to ask ‘What on earth have you been doing all this time?’ The short answer is writing the next novel. The long one includes other things like unpacking after the house move (still haven’t finished the change of addresses!), trying to put the house back together as various bits fall apart, organising a Wizard of Oz party for my son, celebrating turning forty and more recently trying to rig up some kind of wire system in the attic so my son can indeed fly like Mary Poppins!
Anyway, I’m back and I promise faithfully not to leave it so long next time. The good news is that my next novel THINGS I WISH I’D KNOWN is done, dusted and very soon to hit the bookshelves. The hardback and airport/export editions will be published on March 4. The paperback will be published on May 13.
I thoroughly enjoyed writing it. Particularly as the characters have been with me for such a long time. I first came up with the idea of writing a coming of age novel about a teenage girl obsessed with a famous footballer in 1998. Indeed I was so keen on the idea that I jacked in a perfectly good day job to do it. Unfortunately, although I got an agent for the resulting novel it never found a publisher – despite getting what are known in the trade as rave rejections! But I never gave up on it and after I finished my last novel 10 REASONS NOT TO FALL IN LOVE, I went back to the characters and tried to find a way I could rewrite it by bringing the story up to date.
The result is THINGS I WISH I’D KNOWN, which follows Claire and her best friend Frankie through their teenage years in the eighties and then catches up with them in the present day when Claire finds the ’20 Years From Now’ dream list she’d written as a fifteen-year-old and realises that her life hasn’t exactly turned out as she’d planned.
I wanted to write something about how obsessive teenage girls can be and what might happen if they got to meet the idol on their bedroom wall in real life. I also wanted to deal with the issue of what happens to our teenage hopes and dreams and how we come to terms with the reality of life as a grown-up.
The eighties sections were great fun to write (yes, I had a flick from hell like Claire!) but it was also good to see how the characters had developed over the years. I hope that it will provide the usual mixture of laughs and a few tears along the way.
The first chapter is on the THINGS I WISH I’D KNOWN page, to give you all a taster.
Some other good news is that it will be the first of my novels to be available as an audio book. I’m about to sign a contract with the BBC, who will be producing an audio CD.
And in the meantime it’s back to the drawing board for me as I start work on the next novel. It’s at the very early planning and plotting stage at the moment but I’m thrilled to be at the start of something really exciting as it’s a novel I’ve wanted to write for a long time.
In the meantime I’m looking forward to getting the first reader reactions to THINGS I WISH I’D KNOWN so do let me know what you think.
Love
Linda
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