It’s been hottish, these past few weeks. I’ve often wished my ‘writing cave’ was a real cave, deep in a windswept cliff, perhaps, with lovely cold water running down the walls and bats flapping in and out. Or maybe not.

I have two very different writing projects on the go at the moment. Think black and white, or summer and winter, or even up and down – so switching between them has kept me awake, if rather disorientated. The first is psychological suspense book twelve – eek! – to be published by Hobeck Books on November 15th. The structural edit is done and I’m working on the copy editor’s feedback now. The book has also been to my small team of trusted first readers, and I’ll be pulling all their comments and suggestions together this week. We’re not quite as far on as I’d thought, because both the cover designer and the copy editor have had covid, but there’s plenty of time before November.

One comment from Sue, the copy editor, made me laugh. The main character in this book is a vet, and one day she was treating a badger with a head injury. Someone asked if it would make it, and she replied that it ‘wasn’t out of the woods yet’. Sue’s comment here was that given that the badger was probably desperate to get back INTO the woods, I maybe hadn’t used quite the right turn of phrase at this point…

My other project is the series of feel-good novels I’m adapting from my old novella series set right here in Switzerland by our lovely lake. I’m going to self-publish these next year, starting in springtime and with book four – the Christmas book – coming out late autumn. This is the one I’m working on at the moment, and it isn’t half odd having your characters running around shovelling snow and decorating Christmas trees while it’s 34°C outside and you’re sitting melting in your shorts and flip flops. I have to say, I’m enjoying being in feel-good land again. Not a dead body in sight, and no bleeding badgers, either.

Last week, I got to talk about both projects when crime writer Louise Mangos and I made a podcast with the lovely ladies at Book Lover’s Companion in Vienna. (At least, the ladies were in Vienna; Louise and I were in Switzerland and we were all on Zoom.) The finished podcast will be out later in the month.

So that’s been my writing world this summer. Others writers have been busy too. On Tuesday, we’re having an extra blog post; Helen Pryke will be here to talk about her new release. The Healer’s Legacy is the final book in her ‘Healers’ series. I’ve read it, and it’s a corker!

I’ll leave you with a photo of our lake, taken last Wednesday from the train halt down the road here (it isn’t really big enough to call a station). The different shades of the water are caused by the Bise wind coming from the north. Good because it keeps the temperature down a little, bad because it’s a dry wind and we REALLY need some rain…