A Garden Party And What Else Has Morton Been Up To?

What Makes Me A Writer By Caroline James Who Is The Real Lilac Mills?

A Garden Party And What Else Has Morton Been Up To?

I’m really enjoying my blog visitors’ posts at the moment and I do hope my readers are too – plenty more coming up soon. There was a gap in my schedule this week, so I thought I would do an update on what I’ve been up to.

I have been persevering with my sourdough bread making and have found a kindred spirit with author Angela Petch who is also on the same baking journey. The warmer weather threw my making into disarray as I wasn’t experienced with how the temperatures would affect my bread mix, so I had a couple of disasters. This week’s loaf is the best I’ve made texture wise and it tastes lovely, but I still need to perfect oven temperatures as the crust is rather too crusty.

I am still crocheting every evening and am just finishing off one blanket (Spring Love by Ana Morais Soaras – link here) and about to start another (Fairy Dust Mosaic by Rosina Plane – link here).

https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/spring-love-cal

https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/fairy-dust-mosaic

We are hoping to visit Norfolk soon and so I have been working on my husband’s Norfolk branch of his family history in anticipation of our visit. I’d forgotten how much I love family history research and have vowed to do much more. I particularly need to write up the family information I have, as if anything happened to me I doubt anyone would make head or tail of my files and papers as I have been collecting them for years.

As for writing, I have divided my current work in progress into five parts and am gradually assessing each part and editing the first draft of the first book in a new series. I will be honest and say that I much prefer raw new writing to this slog of getting all my ducks in a row with an edit, but if you want a book to be published, of course, this is a necessary evil. New ideas for other books keep arriving in my head and I have parked them after making notes, but really I would love to pursue these ideas instead. Author Alison May used to tell me off when I get to this stage and I can still hear her voice saying “Step away from the shiny.”

Life is quite busy at the moment and it is easy not to make the time for writing or the less preferred editing, so I will make another vow here on my blog that I will make more time for ‘writing dates’ – in other words setting time aside for writing. After all, the sooner I finish the self-editing on my work in progress the sooner I can get to work on those shiny new ideas.

I have been writing seriously now for over ten years and had seven books published, but writing is a strange business that can be fraught with self-doubt. With this in mind, it was lovely to be invited to my publisher’s tenth anniversary garden party in London recently. Joffe Books took over my first publisher Choc Lit just over a year ago. I travelled to London on my own and met up with Jan Baynham at Paddington Station. Then we went on the tube to Covent Garden and met up with Berni Stevens. Berni knows London well and so we walked to the venue rather than taking the tube. We met up with other Choc Lit authors in a pub and it was really lovely to get together. We then walked all together to the garden party venue.

Choc Lit Family

I was lovely to meet up with Joffe staff and Jasper Joffe himself. I think it was nice to have a day feeling like a proper author lol. Thank you Joffe Books for inviting me.