Peak Pages

Still a bit jet-lagged: we find we're waking up in the middle of the night but then rolling over at 8 and sleeping until gone half past 9. That's going to have to change tomorrow when Barbara goes back to the library so it's a good cut-off point for me to get back to serious work. We're spending a showery day indoors and I'm printing out my drawings on the double-page spread format that I'm working to for the new book. You can do so much on screen, but I find that I need to see real life pages to get a feel for the character of the book.

When we were in the Hawkridge bookshop (left) in Castleton on Friday I was surprised by the number of publications there are on the Peak District. Hawkridge have a big selection of the out-of-print Peak District books too but none of them were at all like mine though, so I think there's room for another title.

Sex and Sketchbooks

When we were in Texas, Rheba was teasing me:

'Richard, you should include more sex in your books then you could make a lot of money and come over to America whenever you like' (Rheba has a soft spot for Harlequin romances - the American equivalent, I guess, of our Mills & Boon).

I questioned her logic because I have a friend who has written dozens of erotic novels but I haven't noticed her jetting off to America at frequent intervals. But my friend Wendy Wootton, who I've known since schooldays, does go to glitzy gatherings of Romantic Novelists at the Ritz. She writes romance and a variety of short stories too, under the name of Portia da Costa, Megan Paul, Dorothy Starr . . . and several other aliases. She's been published in America and now has a following in Japan.

Her leading men have an unlikely habit of plunging into a Lake District beck at dawn or going skinny-dipping in a trout stream. Brrr . . .

Check out Wendy's website, and her motley assortment of moggies; Boy, Alice, Mulder and Kuffler (left) via the link below. Those four deserve a Portia da Costa book all to themselves.

Links

Hawkridge Books and Bed and Breakfast (sounds like my perfect accomodation!)

Wendy Wootton . . . her books and her cats.

Richard Bell, richard@willowisland.co.uk