A Novel Surprise

Phew! Yesterday was busy and wonderful. Drive Me To Distraction is out there, and my mother has bought a copy so at least I've sold ONE!!

The blog tour is continuing.  I've got a give-away happening over on the Australian Romance Readers Blog, you just need to leave a comment :)  And I'm on the Romance Australia blog today, with an in-depth interview as well... my favourite bit...
At home I cook: under duress. I used to love cooking. I even wanted to be a chef once. But then I had a child who yells YUCK or SPEW at every single thing I put on the table, and after seven years it’s sucked the joy out of it all.

Sad but true.  You can also find out what my favourite book was as a child, and if I'm a plotter or a pantser :)

But, you say, none of this is a 'novel surprise'...

Well, the next book I'd planned to write is a Australian based cyber terrorists take over the world type story, with our feisty heroine saving the day, assisted by our warm hearted but dangerous hero.  Going to be called Running With The Hunted.

Last year, as regular readers know, was shit. To put it nicely.  Dealing with Miss 6s aspergers diagnosis and my Grandfathers slow agonising demise made for long stressful months.  I had started Running With The Hunted, but come across a plot snafu (in which the Australian army ended up fighting itself - don't ask, it was ridiculous and its being deleted!) and let it go.  Instead I turned my attention to writing a couple of novellas over the Christmas break.

I'd thought I'd written about 20K before I got to the plot snafu.  And so, when I happened to click on the folder (when I was having a file re-arrange and Not Editing Things as I should've been) I was a bit stunned to see there were 19 chapters.  Yep. 19.

On further investigation I found I had 77K words down. I have no memory of writing them at all.  Yes. That is how stressed I was last year. It says it all.  I'm reading it through now, its like re-reading a very familiar book. Rather weird.

So it looks like I've got another full length novel to get editing.  What with getting Drive out there, The Bunker ready for submission, plus some work I'm doing on one of my novellas (Dark Moon Rising) I've not sat down and written anything new since the end of January.  And with all these people doing NaNoWriMo at the moment the urge to start a new story is overwhelming (it'll be called Fat Chance, see I have the name).

But the house is a mess, one of the bathrooms smells like a mixture of dead possum and drains, and I've turned into Mrs Porky of Porksville from sitting on my large bottom for so many hours.  Its time to do a little less working and a little more life balancing I feel.

Watch this space (you just know I'm going to be eating those words).