8th June 2006

Well, Blaze of Silver, the final part of the de Granville Trilogy, is well on its way. One of the peculiar things about being an author is how your time-scales have to alter. Writing a book is a little like having a baby, in that it's a long gestation period and some of it is rather painful, but then, once the baby's born, it disappears to be made respectable before being launched out into the world. Waiting to see the dust-jacket always plays on the nerves. Will you like it? And if you don't, will you dare say so? I've been really lucky so far in that I've loved my jackets - the one on the left is the Puffin jacket for the story of my unfortunate Uncle Frank - but other authors have real horror stories with covers that seem to them to bear no relation what they thought they had written. Perhaps some designers have agendas all of their own ...

But I also have other big news. I am to write a quartet of books, still 'epic adventures set in the past which may or may not be true', (the modern way of describing historical novels) for Quercus. Once I had finished shouting 'hurrah!' and downed a quick glass or two of champagne, I settled down to think. Except of course, once the bubbly effect of the champagne wears off, I tend to fall asleep. Being asleep at the keyboard is a very wierd experience since if your head nods forward, when you wake up you have typed screeds of stuff. You scan it anxiously. Could it be brilliant? Well, it might be, except that it all seems to be in code. Mine was a mishmash of sdfga or ';lkjk. My forehead is not trained in touch-typing.

When beginning a new project, I spend a lot of time reading, which is very nice since you can do it outside and, believe it or not, it's been quite hot even in Glasgow. I sit in my jungaloid (is there such a word? If there isn't, there should be) garden and concentrate. Except I don't because it's impossible to sit in a garden without seeing millions of things that need to be done, so I'm up and down like a yoyo, pruning this, tidying that, sweeping the other. The dogs get absolutely fed up because as soon as I move, they feel honour bound to do the same, just in case I was thinking of taking them for a walk.

Anyhow, in the few moments of peace, I find myself reading T. H. White's The Once and Future King. Blast Mr. White to Fiery Hell, as my son, who is in particularly swashbuckling mode at the moment, might say. Mr. White is a genius. He tells the story of King Arthur as nobody else. He begins with Arthur as a boy, generally known as The Wart, and the reader, like the Wart, is changed into different animals and birds by the magician Merlin. What Mr. White didn't know about everything on earth and a few things above and below isn't worth knowing. And he was writing long before Google was invented. I'm glad I'm not writing about Arthur or I would lie on the floor of my study weeping. How to better T. H. White? Impossible.

Today I'm going to have my hair cut and, whisper it, coloured (of course). It's always a moment for me, when the hairdresser says 'what colour'? I have a wild desire to go red, or even orange, and frighten my family into fits. Or perhaps I could go green to complement the budgies?

Onwards and upwards,
Katie