april already

It's hard to believe it's April already, and I never posted in March. I don't know what I've got against March, except that I always think it's going to be warm and it's always freezing.

Only a month to go before I return to the States for another book tour. Last year, I came home buzzing like a bee, and the buzz lasted all summer. It wasn't just the people, the plumbing and the fantastical cakes, it was that special US 'can do' thing, which, forgive the pun, we 'can't do' over here. And the US is the country of the West Wing. How on earth did I manage so long without CJ? We're only on series 6, which means we've still got a whole series to go. I've no idea what we'll do when it's finished. Start all over again, I dare say, or we'll all, including the dogs, have violent withdrawal symptoms.

I've been thinking about blogs a lot recently. They're funny things, aren't they, raising lots of questions. Should you be completely honest? Should you make stuff up? The biggest temptation for me is to be sunny all the time and use the blog as a kind of holiday. I find it hard to use it as a diary as I believe that some things should be secret. There should be snippets of ourselves and our lives that we take with us to the grave, things we've never told anybody, or perhaps just one other person. But private thoughts are not fashionable. There is a sense that anything private has no meaning; that meaning is only given if something is observed, or written up, or declared on Oprah. I tell all therefore I am.

On the other hand, I would, could I find the courage, find it useful to write about how hard I find the whole creative process some days, and how a sense of desolation can really wallop you, particularly at the stage when nothing in a book will settle down. But that can sound like complaining, and as an author with a fantastic book deal, I have absolutely no business to complain. Balance, balance, balance! I've never had much. I was always the child who wobbled on the wall and eventually fell off, usually into a cowpat.


Onward and upwards,
Katie