The Distraction of Fresh Tomatoes

My blog is being sadly neglected and I apologise. As part of my apology I am giving you this lovely photo of the tomatoes I just now hunted from our garden. It is like hunting a bit, and one of my favourite things about gardening. Searching in the spicy green leaves to find the little red jewels. Then picking and assessing what you got.

So why have I been so thoroughly neglectful of my lovely little blog?

1. It is the beginning of summer.
This needs no explanation.

2. I am stuck in up to my elbows with my latest work in progress.
I have four months to wallow in my fiction. The first project for that time is a new novel which is a prequel to a novel I've been fighting with for about four years. I gave it to an editor friend of mine who gave me some sterling ideas about how to get it in shape. It was a thriller but my friend thought my cop and his friend seemed destined for a series and suggested I re-work the book into a detective novel. I've done a detective series before, my Kate Gomolemo series that includes The Fatal Payout and Murder for Profit, so this was something I was familiar with and decided to give it a go. BUT then something happened. I read a book, recently published, that is very similar to this book I'd been struggling with for four years and if I changed it to a detective novel it would be even more similar. So I decided to have my cop and his friend meet in a book before that one- which is the book I'm currently working on- and then after I finish this one I will go back to the first one which is now really the second one. Understand?

3. I've been reading lots of fabulous books.
These I intend to blog about soon.

4. I signed two contracts for two new books and I sent one of my wallflower novels out to a few agents.
One contract is for the third book in my Detective Kate Gomolemo series which will be published by Vivlia Publishers in South Africa. The second book is also to be published by Vivlia and is a children's historical mystery (is there such a genre? ). I also sent out queries to some agents in America for my novel Claudia Lanchaster's Adventures in Love, a young adult romance. I have had one response so far and they asked to see the entire novel, so cross fingers!

So those are really the main reasons I'm neglecting my blog. But I will try to be better. In the meantime enjoy the tomatoes because I'm intending to eat a fair share of them for lunch and they will soon be finished.