Saving the Lakeside Hotel is two weeks old tomorrow, and I’m beginning to recover from the unexpected suddenness of having my first full length feel-good book catapulted into the world. I was very happy to have lovely review posts last week by Lizanne Lloyd and Helen Pryke, which you can read HERE and HERE – and getting an Amazon best seller flag was a highlight too. Best of all, though, were some lovely comments I’ve had from readers. It’s scary, starting something completely new like this, and to know that people are receiving the book well is uplifting.

This week, I’ve been busy preparing book 2 in the series for publication at the end of this month – huge thanks here to my sons for help with the files and with my computer.

One of the most anticipated parts of preparing a book is when you see the cover image for the first time. There’s always the doubt in your head – will the title fit the space? Will there be enough room under the image for the strapline? Will it look good beside my other books? As usual, James at Go On Write had no problems with my wordy requests – and there’s the result on the left.

In this book, as the title suggests, Stacy returns to Switzerland, and finds herself in the middle of a building site – but more about that another time.

People have asked me how it feels to be having a break from writing psychological suspense fiction after all those years. In a way, though, the psychological suspense writing was me having a break from writing feel-good fiction, as that was where I started out. A few weeks ago I was on the Women Writers, Women’s Books website talking about it, and how I came to write in the two genres. It all started in the Brownie Guides…

For the past several months I’ve been mulling over another blog series here, now that the Classic Comfort posts have come to an end. Unfortunately, I didn’t have an idea to bless myself with until the middle of last week when inspiration arrived in N.E. Switzerland. Like the other blog series, I’ll be inviting different writers to take part. We’ll have the first post next week (by me), then posts by other writers throughout the year.

I’ll leave you with a summer photo of the real lakeside here in Switzerland – a pretty chilly lakeside it’s been this past week, but I guess spring will arrive at some point…