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One of my readers wrote to enquire how the revisions are going and to ask what kind of writer am I? The kind, for instance, who has everything carefully plotted before a single word gets written?

No, I’m not. That’s my problem. I’m a seat of the pants writer. Because my novels are character-driven, as soon as I have the character clear in my head I want to let her fly. Sometimes her navigator (that’s me) hasn’t spent enough time with the maps. ‘Turn left at Poland’ isn’t always enough.

Anyway, the good news is that the rebuild is going well and we should be in a position to hang the drapes and sign off the jacket design by the end of January. The not so good news is that I’ve completely missed my usual publication slot. If you think books can be produced super fast these days, think again. It takes so long you’d truly think the monks at Kells were scratching it out on vellum. 

The Liar’s Daughter won’t be out till October,I’m afraid. Which means it’ll be doing battle with things like Jamie Oliver’s inevitable new cookbook and the Duchess of Cornwall’s Step-Gran’s Survival Guide. Ah well.

A glance at my diary tells me that next Wednesday, my usual blog-posting day, is Boxing Day, or St Stephen’s as we call it here in Ireland, and I’ll be taking a couple of the grandchildren to see Cinderella.  So I’ll thank you now for following me through the ups and downs of my writing year and wish you all a very merry Christmas and a stocking full of good books.

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