Yipee! I think my writing life is back on track again. Or I hope it is. I trust the enthusiasm I’m feeling right now will stick with me for the foreseeable future. There are still so many stories floating around inside my head. And I keep getting more. I have to see them come to fruition.

I am content with my new story which I’ve entitled “Jeopardized Marriage.” I wanted to use Marriage in Jeopardy as a title until I discovered an Australian romance with the same name, blast. I’m still playing around with the synopsis. Like so many writers, I struggle to make out a decent synopsis. I write it, then discover I’ve only written plot details. No good, so I start again. Then the piece is full of emotion and conflict and hardly any storyline at all. Still no good. Another dozen or so tries and I hope I might have a decent synopsis with the right percentage of character development, conflict, plot, and HEA resolution.

I’ve struggled for a couple of years or so with my writing. I seriously considered not bothering anymore, even though I still have so many ideas running around inside my head. Figuring I had proved whatever I’d felt the need to prove, I had written nine romances and had them traditionally published by a great publishing house. No one could call me a one-book wonder. Losing my long-time editor, the wonderful Maggie Johnson, was a blow, although she’d given me plenty of warning of her retirement. The idea of getting back on track and working so closely with someone else was daunting, especially as I felt Maggie and I had established a lasting friendship during our association. A friendship that endures beyond writing.

The writing I had already done prior to Covid hitting the world suddenly seemed unusable. In one story, the heroine is a doctor, a second story is set on a cruise liner. Both deeply impacted by the pandemic. How could I continue these stories in a Covid world? At a talk I was giving to a writing group, one of the attendees provided the answer. Why not set the stories five years ago, prior to Covid? They would still fit into the “contemporary” mold. Not an idea I had even considered.

So now there was no excuse. Time to seriously get back on track and write. It was during this time I finished “Jeopardized Marriage” and spent much of Auckland’s lockdown editing it. During the gap between then and now, Christmas, New Year, and the excitement of no longer being in lockdown had to be endured. My enthusiasm has returned and I have my fingers this quote from Jerome Lawrence fits my next stories as well.