March 2008

Well, hello! It's 11.53 on a Tuesday morning and I'm sitting at my desk, having spent the morning idling around the web for venues for my brother-in-law's wedding reception, taking the occasional peak at the web sites of those lovely people at ASOS and Topshop and perusing the aisles of Ebay for more tat with which to clutter my house. And I don't feel at all guilty. Because I have finished my book!

Yes, after two years and three months of false starts and aborted missions and babies being born and houses being rebuilt and starting and stopping and starting again, last week I finally got to THE END. I had feared I would never again type those words, that I was destined to spend the rest of my life in the ‘middle bit'. After I'd printed off the manuscript, I waved it in Jascha's face and said ‘look! Evidence that I do actually work up there, I don't spend all day on Ebay!' He said, ‘hmmmm. I bet it just says All work and no play makes Lisa a dull girl 20,000 times.'

Well, although at times I might have felt like Jack Torrance up here in my study, I got there in the end and yesterday my lovely agent Judith took me out for lunch in Primrose Hill to give me the verdict, and phew, hurrah and thank the Lord, she really likes it. As ever it needs some tweaking, but nothing major and then it will go off to Penguin, whereupon I will be crossing my fingers very tightly indeed.

Christmas moments

So it's been a good three months, all in all. Starting at the beginning, Christmas was lovely, we spent the day at my in-laws up the road and had a wonderful, cosy, relaxing day. Boxing Day was spent at my sister's house and was thoroughly raucous, while New Year's Eve was quieter than expected as both the girls had chickenpox so we couldn't really take them out anywhere.

General familial chaos on Boxing Day

Oh, and then, on Friday 11 th January (I have it in my diary, followed by lots of exclamation marks) Evie started sleeping through the night. Yes! Hurrah! We had a month-long run of five am wake-ups which I DID NOT LIKE IN THE LEAST BIT, but now we're at a gentle 6-6.30 start to the day. (If you had told me ten years ago that one day I would think of 6am as a ‘gentle' start to the day I would have thought you were insane). So now that she is sleeping through I feel a lot more comfortable about going out on the razz at night and my hibernation period is well and truly over!

Last month myself and seven other author friends, prised ourselves out of our pyjamas, away from our desks and headed towards the bright lights of the west end for a night out to celebrate our PLR (Public Lending Rights) payments. A little known fact: every time you, or somebody else, takes a book out of the library, the author gets a few pence and once a year all those pences are added together and credited to the author's bank account. Now, if you're Barbara Taylor Bradford or Agatha Christie, your payment would probably be enough to invest in a small property, but for everyone else it's just like a lovely little annual tip. So this year we decided to treat ourselves, and had a fantastic dinner at Quaglinos , and then drinks at the Groucho (but of course!). I rolled home at 2.30, pleasantly drunk, only to be woken three and half hours later by young Evie. It took me three days to recover from but was worth every moment.

In the last three months I have also:

1. Attended the Costa Book Awards, as a guest of the lovely Jenny Colgan, where I sat within spitting distance of Alex James from Blur – which was nice.
   
2. Been a guest of Sarah Brown at a little cocktail party she threw at number 10 for everyone who has supported her charity, Piggybank Kids (read all about it here scroll down to 14th February). Mike Gayle and I spent the night hoovering up as many celebrities as possible with my piece de resistance being telling Davina McCall, unprompted, and a propos of nothing that I wouldn't be having sex with my husband that night.
   
3. Been on a girls' night out.
   
4. Taken Jascha out for a birthday dinner at a smart restaurant in town.
   
5. Spent not one but TWO Saturday nights at the pub.

My life is back. Hurrah!

PLR Party

The girls are both great. Evie is now ten months old and still a lovely, gigantic lump of love. She has lots of brown hair now, and her personality is also starting to come through. She's feisty! She has already had a couple of tantrums, and is very loud and boisterous. She is also the Friendliest Baby in Hampstead ™. She smiles at anyone who looks her way, waves at strangers and points at things she finds interesting. She will go to other people quite happily and is very affectionate and cuddly. She isn't on the move yet and, in fact, showing not the slightest interest in crawling, but is starting to cruise (technical term, non-baby types, for walking round a room holding on to things) so will probably just go straight to walking without the on-the-floor bit.

Lovely Evie!

Amelie is also superb. She is doing very well at her lovely new school. She can read and write and is getting very good at maths. We went to our first ever parent/teacher meeting yesterday and she got a rave review. Oh, and she has decided, on reflection, that actually, Evie is the BEST THING EVER. (Although maybe not for long, as last week she made her own sign, featuring a small girl with a cross through her and the words ‘NO TODLS' underneath, which she stuck to her bedroom door. Good to be prepared I guess.)

Lovely Amelie

The paperback of 31 Dream Street will be hitting the shops in a couple of weeks. Penguin didn't do a publicity campaign for me this time, which I was delighted about as I just wanted to concentrate on getting my book finished, but I did have the lovely people from Sky Arts here a few weeks ago to film me for a little slot on the Sky Books Show called ‘In My Study'. My friend Jenny had just done it and told me it would be ‘fun'. It was not fun. Unless your idea of fun is talking to a camera in front of a TV crew. I now have a newfound respect for anyone on the telly who is doing a ‘talking to camera' piece. Not only is it mortifyingly embarrassing, but they have to re-shoot it about a thousand times, so just as you've got over the hideous mortification of doing it once, someone says, ‘that was great, can we do it again.' I felt like a complete plank, so no-one was more surprised than me when I saw the finished production here on YouTube Ha! I look quite normal (apart from the strange, inexplicable limping across the room thing.)

Well, that's me for another quarter. And what a wonderful and generally satisfying three months it's been. I can finally say that I have finished my book AND my baby is sleeping through the night. Hurrah! My work here is done …

The next quarter sees me:

1. Signing a new contract ( gulp … wish me luck!)
2. Seeing my brother-in-law get married in Marylebone
3. Seeing my younger sister get married on the Italian Riviera
4. Starting book number eight
5. Celebrating Evie's first birthday … wow.

Have a great Easter and gorgeous Spring and I'll see you back here in the Summer!

Lots of love,
Lisa xxx

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