Anyway, even if a robot isn’t cleaning my windows for me, something equally amazing has happened already in 2012 – my book, Hot Chocolate, has come out on Kindle. Yes, that’s right, in English. It came out in German in 2010 (because the German publishing company, Ullstein, bought the rights at the Frankfurt book fair and brought out a gorgeous little edition which, sadly, I couldn’t read) but now it’s in sturdy old English, with a cover designed by the lovely Andy, who sorts out my blog. I must say, I do think it looks rather fab. And, of course, it’s all about chocolate and love, two of my favourite subjects and, I hope, yours too.

Due to the sheer wondrousness of Kindle, I was able to put in on sale at the bargainacious price of £2.05, which I am pretty sure is LESS than the price of a hot chocolate at any good cafe, and certainly less than any flat-white-skinny-moccachino that you could purchase in SE21.

And, even if Father Christmas didn’t leave a Kindle in your stocking this year, there are lots of Kindle converters out there which help you download the book from Kindle and then read it on your computer, or print it out. This is one of the many out there: http://www.ebook-converter.com/kindle-pc-converter.htm.

So you see, there’s no escape, is there, really? You’ll just have to buy it. Go on, you know you want to.

I started my blog, in mid-divorce, as a sort of therapy. It was an outlet – for my own frustrations at the ridiculously aggressive divorce laws we have in this country and, I hoped, it would also be a potential resource for anyone else going through the same thing. Now, six years down the line, it’s become so much more. Of course I still have the odd rant about the difficulties of separation, blending and reintegration – but mostly my blog has become a description of everyday life for a family which is sometimes two, sometimes four and sometimes six-strong, depending on who’s where and what’s going on. A friend came round last night, had a look around, and said, ‘what you need is a really, really big wall chart.’

What I really really need is someone to direct the traffic. But oops, that’s me. It’s not easy, but I think, dear reader, I may, just may, be getting better at it.

Meanwhile, I also use my blog as a platform for my writing. Sometimes I try out other styles or personae, sometimes I just shamelessly flog my wares. And that’s what I am going to do now as – woooohoooo – my first novel, Hot Chocolate, has just come out on Kindle. It costs £2.25, or probably less than the price of a hot chocolate at Starbucks (I tried to check but couldn’t find the prices, sorry) and it’s a lot less fattening. If you do buy it – and there’s no pressure, *ahem* – and you have a minute to spare, it would be wonderful if you could give me a review.

Now then, what photo shall I choose? Tara and Jay want a picture of my blogging inspiration. I can’t use the children, who are really my inspiration, so I’ll pick this picture, which is actually one of Tara’s. It’s a beautiful woodland scene which I use as my screensaver in my study, at the heart of my lovely new home.

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There are plenty of these bits – the occasional mean streak, when I’ll say or do something that upsets someone else, even the odd bit of sneakiness, when I get my way by underhand methods. Well, needs must. But mostly I would dump my obsessiveness.

Don’t get me wrong, it can be very useful to be obsessive, particularly for a writer. No one else cares whether you get the words down or not (unless you are JK Rowling, of course, and vast industries ride on the back of your pen) and it is only your own drive to continue which pulls the whole sorry camel train of translucent plot and Ryvita characters along.

But obsessiveness is not my friend at 3am when I cannot forget a slight. It is not helpful when I rehash conversations with no hope of getting them to turn out as beautifully as a row of freshly baked cupcakes. And I particularly hate it when it makes it difficult to forgive people who are not perfect, damn them.

If I had a pensieve, it would be overflowing, and all that dry ice would fill up the house. We’d be blundering about all over the place. Just as well they don’t exist. But I would still love one all the same. What would you put in yours?

The novel is about a journalist-mother-of-two (oh yes, it’s an exhausting imaginative stretch, writing fiction ) who messes up bigtime at work and slinks away to Brussels to reinvent herself. Chocolate plays an enormous part in the book (gosh, the research killed me. Well, my waistbands anyway) and Brussels is the capital city of chocolate, so to me it all made sense. But UK publishers shied away from Brussels like voodoo vampire goths scared by a large head of garlic. Oh, sometimes we got close, there was a lot of flirting, some heavy-breathing, at one point I swear I felt a hand on my knee …. but in the end it was lovely German Ullstein who snapped up the book, turned the book into such a beautiful objet d’art, and sold shed-loads of it.

Now, having seen the Mummy Misfit launch her fabulous eBook, Diary of a Mummy Misfit, and seen that lovely Tania of Larger Family Life also has a book out there on Kindle, I’ve thought – I’m joining that club! It’s a gorgeous feeling knowing that a lot of people have enjoyed my book in German, but I would love to have it out there in my native language too.

I’m now busily sorting out the cover, formatting the book, lining up the best proofreader in the business (mwah, TL) and fiddling around with fonts. But soon, very soon, it’ll be out there, my baby, finally in English. Now would you all just mind buying it? Go on, you know you want to. Thank you x

There are those – probably Mr X amongst them – who think my whole life since having children has been Me Time. Before the advent of Child One and Child Two, I had a very stressful job as a feature writer on a national newspaper, and rarely arrived home before 8, 9, 10. I almost never cooked and I spent my high salary on things like ridiculously expensive leather gloves. I’m not even going to tell you what my handbags cost, I can’t bear to think about it. In a way, I never had Me Time then either, as my soul belonged to the newspaper, or to a lifestyle that I was in the thick of but didn’t love.

Children came and 15 years have passed. Nappy days, happy days. Now, yes I blog, I write the odd article and I’m supposed – ahem – to be finishing novel 2. But there are moments when I find myself alone in the house, with no-one yelling at me to find clean tights/help with chemistry revision/produce food/write 100o words  now. Perhaps I should be cleaning that yickky spot that I know lurks right round the back of the fridge. The cat has been batting cherry tomatoes down there for some time and that really can’t be good. But increasingly I’m wondering whether I shouldn’t just be done with it, acknowledge the fact that I have genuine free time to spend just like everyone else, turn on the TV, turn off my head and watch Jeremy Kyle for a change.

It’s the guilt that stops me. Somehow I still think that if I relax for a moment, the system will grind to a halt, despite the fact that the children the system was designed to support are now off on their own, developing their own systems.

Why do women feel this guilt and pressure to perform, even when there’s no-one watching and not much that needs to be done? Am I the only one who finds herself de-fluffing the tumble dryer filter instead of giving in to my craving for Bargain Hunt? Or are the rest of you slumped on your sofas as I write? Please tell me it’s not just me ….

My publisher was glad I liked my legs but pointed out sweetly I’d have to wait a bit before getting my own copy of the new edition. It won’t be out for eight months. I think I got my German in a bit of a tangle over at www.amazon.de . Even though you might think that a date is a date and is pretty clear in any language, being, ahem, numbers, it certainly wasn’t to me. I also copied in my lovely agent on my email.

My lovely agent then emailed back and pointed out that it would be very nice if I could show her, and my publisher, the odd page or two of the sequel to Schokoherz, which I have now been working on for, erm, two years. Well, that’s working off and on. More off than on, obviously. I’ve had some good excuses. Divorce, emotional turmoil, blah, blah, erm, the weather. And the cat sits on my keyboard! How on earth can I be expected to write under these conditions?

All right, all right, Lady Antonia Fraser managed to pen several whodunnits and a biography while running off with Harold Pinter, and he himself dashed off a play or two while trying to get divorced and remarried. I know this because I was given a copy of Must You Go?, Fraser’s account of her life with Pinter, for Christmas. I am much reassured by the fact that they had twenty or thirty happy years together after the traumatic bit was over. But obviously they were not made of really sensitive stuff, despite winning great cupboards-full of awards for their literary oeuvres, as they just kept on writing no matter what hoo-has were erupting around them. Or maybe they just didn’t have cats sitting on their keyboards?

Anyway, I accept that the time for prevarication is over. I have to show my publisher 35,000 words by April. I’ve written nearly 60,000 already, but unfortunately they are not in the right order. So I’ve absolutely got to get right down to it. A deadline is a very, very useful thing for concentrating the mind, for making sure that the endless evasion is over. I’m going to get on with revising the first draft straight away.

I’m starting tomorrow.

Anyway, my book has come out in Germany in paperback with a brand spanking new cover! Here’s a picture:

Yes, those are actually my legs. Though how the photographer took the picture without me noticing, I’ll never know. I certainly wouldn’t wear black shoes with a red dress – I wouldn’t wear black shoes at all – so they must have done a bit of clever photo-shopping there, bless them. But that is the exact heel height I normally choose when stepping out for a bit of a saunter through Dulwich village. And I obviously should stop using MiracleGro in the garden, those green heart-shaped flowers are running rampant all over my borders. Very exciting, and I do hope the book is selling like hot strudels in Germany. And, if you do read German and you are one of the adorable people who’ve given me a five star review on www.amazon.de, why thank you so much!

In other news, we were sent tickets to the Churchill Theatre’s inimitable Aladdin panto, featuring the charms of Melinda Messenger, courtesy of Robinson’s panto karaoke. The show was fantastic, and I had meant to review it last week but my computer was broken. Sadly it’s now all over (oh yes it is) but Robinson’s panto karaoke is still going strong, so do pop along. What a brilliant night we had. TL was quite stunned as he hadn’t been to a panto for 30-odd years and wasn’t prepared for the sly wit, slick acting and excellent singing that we were treated to. At some points Wishee Washee had us crying with laughter. The Churchill Theatre was a revelation too, tucked away behind Bromley High Street. I’ve seen that the Moscow City Ballet is performing the Nutcracker there at the beginning of February and I’m really tempted to get tickets.

We were also asked to ‘test’ Lego’s new Hogwarts game - what a great Lego set this was, even for children of four and five who were really a bit young for the game itself. But they did really enjoy the construction process and some of the Lego bits, like the crystal balls and potions, are actually quite beautiful. They ended up inventing their own games with the tiny figures of Harry Potter, Hermione, Ron and the rest, which is quite as it should be.

Also, if you have any family members or friends with birthdays in January, when pickings are slim after Christmas, have a look at Global Angels.  It’s an international charitable foundation championing young people and children around the world. This year, they are taking part in the London 10k run, the Three Peaks challenge, a Channel swim and a bunch of marathons. If you prefer to help out in a less exhausting way, and you have teenage presents to get, their shop has a good range of T-shirts and jewellery.

I backed out. The journalist was sweet about it, though I know full well how incredibly irritating it is when a promising case study interviewee suddenly flunks out. I tell myself it’s to protect my daughters. But is that all it is? Even when I worked on the Daily Express, I always refused to have a byline photo (a mugshot, usually glamorously posed, which goes alongside your name) while other journalists were clamouring to get their faces in the paper. I told myself then that I didn’t see what my appearance had to do with what I wrote.

When my book came out, I realised that my blog could no longer be anonymous, and so I let my name appear. Now, after years hiding behind a photo of a handbag, I actually even use the publicity shot taken for my book jacket. But on Facebook I still use a picture of the book instead of one of  myself, even though most of my Facebook friends have known me for gazillions of years and realise full well that my face is not orange with pink swirly writing.

What’s it all about? I can’t quite work it out. But I am sure that I don’t want to stick pictures of my girls in a national newspaper. They, on the other hand, may have quite different views. Child Two was complaining the other day that she was being seriously held back in her career as an actress by my failure to find her an agent. An agent!! I don’t think I even knew what one was at her age. Well, I’m very happy that she knows what she wants. And even happier that, when she’s a famous actress (as she surely will be) she won’t be hiding behind a picture of her handbag.

So that leaves me with – well, me. It probably seems egotistical (and someone writing a blog about themselves can’t possibly be egotistical, can they? Nooooooo) but I do really like this picture. It’s not, ahem, the best of me ever taken, but it is an honest one, and my smile says a lot. It was taken by Child Two, just after I had finished the final revision of my novel. I look proud, relieved, happy and, frankly, knackered. And yep, I’m still in my dressing gown.

Pretty typical really.

I know I slightly overuse those three little letters, but this is definitely an OMG moment.

My book is coming out on Friday!

I had been vaguely thinking about contacting my darling agent to see when (or even if, I admit I am a terrible pessimist and publishing is a fast-moving, cut-throat and jolly picky world) the book was coming out.  I kept getting cold feet, as she is bound to, rightly, tell me off a bit about slow progress with Novel 2. Then this morning, I had a brainwave. I would check on the German version of Amazon.

Well, I did, and look what I found:

http://www.amazon.de/Schokoherz-Alice-Castle/dp/3547711533/ref=cm_cr_pr_pb_t

Even more exciting, I already had two reviews and 3 and a half stars!!!!!

Then I clicked on the reviews, translated them, and found this:

“Brilliant SF novel about the people in an extreme situation
The earth’s climate has changed completely. The ionosphere, which protects the earth from excessive solar radiation, no longer exists.
The polar caps have melted, the sea level has risen dramatically, Europe is a jungle, where a climate is like in the Cretaceous.”

Ahem. Sadly, my book is not a brilliant SF novel about an extreme situation, though I’m beginning to wish it was. It’s the humorous tale of how a mummy journalist crashes out of her career, then finds her true self by transforming herself into a chocolatier. I  love the title of the book reviewed, though – it’s Carnival of the Alligators. Shiver! I may just have to order it for myself. But you go right ahead and get your copy of Schokohertz – it’s only euro 14.95!

Incidentally, I have been put in a bundle offer with the wonderful JG Ballard, who wrote the autobiographical Empire of the Sun but whose novels were mainly dystopian SF. I’m thrilled, I think he’s fab. Maybe my next novel will have a SF element. Yes, I can see it all now ….Chocolatier mummy sets up her new shop ….then gets whisked away by aliens in a spaceship who give her out of this world chocolate recipes! Right, off I go, 2,000 words by lunchtime ….