a day in the life of an author

Current work: Capri medical romance
Listening to: Def Leppard, X
Reading: next on TBR

That’s what I’m talking about at school this afternoon. Ha. It’s meant to be about how you create a book (fiction and non-fiction), how books are produced, the kind of publicity you do to promote it, and that sort of thing.

My morning, so far:

• discover that DH was clearly distracted (aka reading cycle reviews on his iPod) when letting the dog out, because one of my shoes was in the back garden this morning. Wet, after being there all night. And I only have one pair of shoes I can drive in… which means I have the joy of one wet foot this morning
• daughter has huge tantrum because her hair doesn’t look like Tracy Beaker’s and she was dressing up as Tracy Beaker for book day. Bearing in mind that I spent AGES plaiting it (tiny plaits) last night, and I had a great scene in my head – gone, gone, gone, thanks to her tantrum
• discover that DH (and no, the D doesn't stand for 'dear' this morning) unplugged my iPad while it was charging last night. Now, I have explained to him about the memory effect, i.e. you run the battery down as low as possible and then charge it fully, otherwise the battery doesn’t charge fully and the battery life shortens dramatically. Hissy fit from me, and I put it back on charge. Came home from school run to discover… yes, he’d taken the plug out. Argh! About the only one who hasn’t caused me grief this morning is son.

Sigh. Going to hit the coffee, try to ignore the fact that monster daughter hasn't eaten the chocolate she asked me to buy yesterday and I said it was on condition it was NOT IN THE HOUSE WITH ME ON MY OWN, try to wheedle that scene back, and hopefully write it this morning before I have to change into less scruffy clothes and go out and be Smart Author Person. (Yeah, the acronym works for me, too.)

Meanwhile, I’m over at the Pink Heart Society talking about one of my fave films of the summer. (My two absolute favourites were Inception and Toy Story 3, but my mate Heidi Rice has already covered those – she has excellent taste…) I was going to talk about hero characteristics over here today, but with the Tantrum Queen, Mr ‘I-think-I-know-best-even-when-I-don’t’ and Kleptodog driving me crazy… that’ll have to wait!