Do you dream?

I don't dream much, or if I do, it doesn't "stick". Once, blissfully, I woke with the opening of a book clear as day in my head and rushed straight to my computer and put it down in first person, stream of consciousness mode. It was a couple of years before I actually wrote the book, but I knew the girl in my head, saw her clearly and can still remember that moment when her story started pouring out of the ends of my fingers.

Last night my dream was different. Vivid, one of those that's so real that it's hard to wake up from. It was about a well known author standing for Parliament in the constituency where I grew up. She's American, so this was weird, but the promo was fabulous - glamorous, glossy and gorgeous - like the woman (and her books) and I was telling everyone how great she was even though I hadn't a clue what party she was standing for because I knew she was someone I'd want in my corner. And the public library had posters and flyers everywhere.

I sort of woke once, but the dream wouldn't let me go and the second dip was deeper and darker. I'd left the library and was trying to get some last minute Christmas shopping done - late, in a hurry, getting anxious. And then the spiders came. Dozens of them. Huge and hairy, running about the High Street where I grew up, wanting a chunk of me. I escaped and then someone stopped me to "get my back" and was wrestling with a spider that had its claws into my clothes and would not quit.

She was still struggling when I finally managed to wake up, not sure where I was and still with the spiders very real in my mind. Ugh. Horrible. I'm still a bit shaky, to be honest, but here I am, putting it all down again, although I don't someone think I'll be writing a gothic romance mash-up with a glamorous author politician saving the world from the zombie spiders! That is not an memory I want to live with for three months! However, the imagination is still in full working order and getting on with it even while I sleep and bits of that dream - the panic, the fear, the anxiety will stay with me and power my writing.

Meamwhile I was very glad to see daylight!

The Newest Harlequin Romance/Riva Author

I was going to be talking about my latest Harlequin Romance — The Last Woman He’d Ever Date — today, but instead I’m making way for the newest Harlequin Romance/Riva author in the Harlequin Mills and Boon line-up.

Charlotte Phillips entered the Mills and Boon New Voices competition last autumn and when she made it through the first round, I was the lucky author who was tasked with the job of mentoring her through her second chapter.

It wasn’t my job to write her second chapter for her, but to work with her to show her where her own writing could be strengthened, offer a little advice on what could usefully be left out, give her pointers on what made a scene work and writing technique. Charlotte, let me tell you, was a joy to work with. Full of enthusiasm, excitement, passion, eager to learn, ready to listen, but with that deep down faith in what she’d written, in her story.

When she made it through to the final four I was absolutely overjoyed and although she didn’t win the competition I never doubted that she would make it through to publication.

Since reaching the final four of the competition, she has been working on a new story with the same wonderful editor who works with my own editor and does for me, what I did for Charlotte. Flo keeps me afloat, telling me what she loves about my story while homing in on the slightest weakness because, even after sixty plus books, an editor — standing back from the intense involvement that writing entails — brings a fresh eye to the work.

It’s part of the process.

I have known really good writers who have had wonderfully encouraging letters from publishers but instead of buckling down to the revisions suggested, were affronted, outraged by the suggestion that they change a word. Their mss are returned, untouched, to the drawer and never become that magic thing, a book. It’s their decision, their right, but while a mss is the sole effort of its author, a book is a collaborative effort. The ability to accept that your book isn’t perfect, that it is capable of stepping up another gear, is one of the essential elements that make a published author.

Meanwhile, if you want to share the advice that I gave to Charlotte, you can download Liz Fielding’s Little Book of Writing Romance from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Sony