Don’t all rush to the bookshop, but I’m happy to announce that Double Trouble is on the shelves today.

In this book, Lauren and her friend Tilly travel back in time to Ancient Pompeii. They make new friends and have a great time. In fact, everything is just perfect – until the nearby mountain begins to smoke!

As this is my fifteenth book, I could forgive my family if they get less excited than I would hope, but my daughter Annie surprised me. Not alone did she read Double Trouble when it arrived, but she also painted her nails to match! 

How sweet is that?

My new book has just landed and I’m really happy with how it looks:

My new baby

This is the second in the Friends Forever series. This time Lauren and her friend Tilly travel back to ancient Roman times. Everything is kind of ok, until they discover that they are in Pompeii, and the large mountain near where they live is starting to smoke……..!

Double Trouble will be in a bookshop near you on the first of February.

I’ve got other things on my mind too. Because of the way publishing works, I usually finish a book long, long before it arrives on the shelves. This means that if a book is published, and I don’t have a lot of the next one written, I start to get seriously nervous. Sometimes pressure is good, though – I started book 3 of Friends Forever last Wednesday. I know it’s early days yet, but so far, it’s going very, very well.

I’m really busy at the moment, but feeling guilty at how little I’ve been blogging here lately. So here’s a copy of my recent post from Girlsheartbooks.

(And by the way, that’s an amazing site with some brilliant posts, so be sure to visit soon.)

Happy New Year – hoping all good things will come your way in 2012!

BENEATH THE SURFACE

When I do readings, I’m very often asked the same question – ‘Are you writing a book at the moment?’

Almost always, the truthful answer is ‘yes’. I started to write seriously in 1999, and since then, I’ve always been pretty much ‘writing a book’. But this morning I woke up and had a few horrible thoughts:

* I’m not writing a book at the moment

*I haven’t written anything for a few weeks

My computer screen looks a lot like this lately:

(and a third horrible thought has just come to me – I hope my publisher isn’t reading this post!)

Anyway, the shock of all these thoughts drove me out to my back garden, which is where I always go when I need to calm down.

There I saw the broad beans and garlic that I sowed a few months ago. They grew really well at first, but for the last two months they haven’t budged – it looks like they are just sitting there, doing nothing.

Garlic, apparently doing nothing!

Broad beans, relaxing in the sunshine.

But then I realised that I was only looking at the surface. I know that, deep under the soil, my plants are building up strong roots, so that when the weather warms up again, they’ll be ready to burst into life.

So I’ve decided that’s also what’s happening inside my head. Even though I haven’t written a word lately, my mind has been busy. I’ve been planning a sub-plot for a third Eva book, and I’ve been thinking very hard about a time and a place to set the third Friends Forever book. I know that once I get back to writing, all of this mental groundwork will make my work much, much easier.

So I’ve decided not to panic ……… yet!

Here is Domino keeping a close eye on the Christmas presents - just in case there's one for her!

Hope everyone has an amazing, happy and peaceful Christmas.

A friend drew my attention to this amazing clip of the beginning of Alice next Door. I absolutely love it.

LPS :Alice Next Door Chapter 1 Part 1

Since finding this, I’ve come across lots of other LPS videos. I think they are totally cute, and really, really wish that the technology for that kind of thing was available when I was a child. But then maybe it’s never too late…..