COVENANT takes shape.

It's a bit weird to see your own name appearing on search engines - someone told me the other day that they'd read about my novel being taken to Frankfurt for the International Book Fair. A moment later, and lo-and-behold, there I am!

On a less vain note, I had lunch on Monday with my wonderful editor, Maxine Hitchcock, The Editorial Director of Fiction at Simon & Schuster. Maxine told me a great deal about how things go from here, and introduced me to the hugely friendly team at their offices in London. It turns out that I'll be able to see some cover artwork sometime between now and Christmas, which is hugely exciting! There's much work being done behind the scenes already, and I'm really happy to have been signed to such an enthusiastic and friendly publisher. They're supported by other equally brilliant teams in the United States ( Touchstone ) and Australia.

For my part, the first editorial notes are in, and fortunately Maxine and I are very much on the same wavelength - we've agreed next steps and I'm on the case already. Once this first editorial is complete, there will follow a line-by-line edit, which will fine-tune everything before the manuscript is sent to the copy-editor for the next stage of improvement.

It's back down to work for me once more, but I'm revelling in the writing now and really excited about how things are turning out. Will post again soon, as contracts are now with my agent, Luigi Bonomi, and likely to be signed within a few days.

Deadlines!

I haven't posted much recently as so much has been going on, and I've also been a bit cautious about how much I should write due to possible contractual reasons. I'm hoping that within a few weeks I should be able to write in more detail what's been going on, but for now my main news is that I have my first true dead-lines, with books two and three now having their delivery dates set to Simon & Schuster.

After a few weeks in limbo, it's good to finally have goals to aim for, both of which are well within my reach. Really looking forward to getting stuck into the first draft once I've completed my research. I also have a date for publication of the first novel, but will share that here once the contracts are all signed and everything's in stone.

Most of what's been going on behind the scenes hasn't involved much writing, but instead to the innumerable and unforseen tasks required of me to set myself up as a full time writer. It's been a bit of a caper but when I think about it, it's only been just over a month since the manuscript went out to publishers for auction. While I'm here, I can reveal that that was the same day I was made redundant from my job of eleven years, and just two days before my partner had her twelve-week scan. As you can imagine, it was something of a 'taut' couple of weeks, but everything went fabulously well and now all's good, with Junior healthy and on the way.

Published novelist to be, dad to be... and have to be somewhere else, lunch with Luigi!