And so it’s done.

On Friday, I submitted my new trilogy People of the Star for consideration by my publisher.

It came together amazingly quickly – it's like that moment in the City to Surf when you round the corner, see Bondi Beach and realise that you've made it. Despite the fact you've still got another k and a half to go, your energy rises and you might even run the last couple of hundred metres.

I found the synopsis difficult to write – this trilogy has a more complicated, subtle narrative line than the first, and so getting it down on paper in as few words as possible proved challenging. But after taking a break from the synopsis for a day and re-reading the manuscript for Future Found (tweaking a few little things), the words I needed came together.

So the publisher received the completed manuscript for Future Found and the synopsis for the entire trilogy. Now I sit and wait to see what the response will be.

So what do I do now? Well I kinda laid off the promotional stuff for the past couple of weeks while I worked on Future Found, so I'm going to get back onto that. I'm going to do some admin and clean my office. I need to finish my judging for the RWA, and I want to get stuck into working on a few short stories. And I'm going to do some prep for the next project.

The next project is – a contemporary romance. I've always found the romance aspect of the gadda books pretty easy to write, so now I'll see if I can do it without the whiz-bangery of magic and monsters and other excitement to support it.

I'm intrigued to see how easy I find it. I'm thinking at the moment of aiming for a Harlequin line so I'm looking at a much shorter book than usual. So I won't have the space for intricate worldbuilding or spending a hundred pages getting the reader to fall in love with my characters so when they hook up there will be much rejoicing. I'm going to have to really pare back to the characters, the conflict and the love story.

My prep is going to consist of re-reading the contemporary Harlequins that I own, and also going over some of the romance writing texts I have, particularly the two Valerie Parv books. Then come the beginning of June, I'll be ready to start drafting my first romance-only novel.