After yesterday’s excitement, I settled down at last to finish what was supposed to be a final draft and ended up a Shitty Second Draft. At 157 pages (42,410 words) it was a pretty full draft, so I was relieved to get to the end.
Now I’m going to chuck it out and start again from scratch.
Oddly, this decision feels better than trying to rework what I’ve done. Somewhere in the process, I’ve got to know Frith and George and they’re not the cardboard characters who have been going through the motions for the last 157 pages. So, deep breath, and fingers crossed that this draft will be the one where everything clicks.
I was so taken up with the RoNA Rose short-listing that I forgot to mention that The Billionaire’s Blind Date is now available as a digital download from the Mills & Boon site or Amazon.
A novella, The Billionaire’s Blind Date was originally part of a special anthology released in the UK as All in a Day and as a duet called Here Comes The Bride in North America.
Linked to Christmas Eve Marriage, The Billionaire’s Blind Date is the story of Clara’s mother, Nell and how her life changes completely in just 24 hours.
The brief, a story that took place within a single day, had me scratching my head at first, but in the end the strict limits were strangely liberating, and I remember enjoying writing this story a lot. Plus, I always loved Clara in RITA-winning (just thought I'd get that in!) Christmas Eve Marriage, so I was very glad to make her happy too! There's something very appealing about coming across characters that you're already familiar with from another book, I think. I'd like to write more linked books, but it seems to be hard enough to write one at the moment, let alone a whole series. But one of these days ...
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