Anyone for Secrets?......the book is finished and now life can back to normal...sort of?!

Hey folks,

How shall I start....Happy Halloween, Happy Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Valentine's Day and Happy Birthday to me....whew that's a lot of events to have missed writing about whilst I've been busy getting book no 3 Anyone for Secrets? finished and to say that I'm relieved and completely delerious with happiness would be an understatement!

Writing this book (and trying to find reasons not to write this book) have led me on one hell of a journey!

Without going into too much detail 2011 was a bit of a crap year for me...anything that could go wrong inevitably did and my stress levels were rather high! Just to clarify....d'ye know the ad where Skittles keep exploding everywhere...well that would be comparable to what my blood pressure was doing to my head on a regular basis!! But hey....I'm still standing and so is everybody else in our rather mad household so I guess someone somewhere must have been looking down on us!

But anyway...getting back to the book...it's amazing the excuses you can find not to write when you're not in the mood or when your head is so full of other things that you have the attention span of a flea and can't sit still for two seconds...

You can -:

Clean out the fridge
Defrost the freezer
Take a toothbrush to the grouting in the bathroom
Fill black binliners full of unwanted clothes for charity
Manically sort out cupboards and hotpresses
Walk the dog (even if you don't own a dog you can borrow somebody elses)

In other words you can have a very clean and shiny house which you would have the peace and contentment to enjoy if there wasn't a feckin' laptop sitting in the corner winking at you incessantly and sending out waves telling you that you need to write 50,000 more words before the book is finished!

If truth be told I actually completed the first draft of this book some time ago but was deeply unhappy with it as I felt that my own personal problems may have been affecting my writing to a certain degree...my characters were all very angry and said feck a lot! (Think Father Jack on a good day here!)

Thankfully, however, with the help of my ever patient agent...the gorgeous Emma Walsh and the nice people at Poolbeg I was given the time and space I needed to get into a better frame of mind and now I have re-written most of the book and am now much happier with the results! I even did a little dance when I pressed the send button on my email on Sunday and sent my manuscript on its merry way...whoop whoop!

And so life has indeed returned to normal and my version of life being normal is life being mad but with three teenagers (where hormones ensure that everything is a tragedy), a mad Wii obsessed five year old and a one year old who has just learned the art of head butting....what d'ya expect??

But as long as everyone is healthy, happy and content then I feel likewise and thankfully the status quo has now been restored as have I!!

The girl is back...and she's loving it!!