Ok, so it’s already been a few weeks since my last post, which means I’ve fallen behind on the promise to blog more often. But I am working my way through the other items on my to do list for the last 100 days of 2025, and I also have a great new development to report.

Firstly, September’s challenge – Complete the draft of book 2 in The Mermaid Hotel Series.

I completed this a little late, but sent the book off to my beta reader last week. A win!

October:

Complete the draft of book 3 in The Mermaid Hotel Series. I’m getting on really well with this and have got the word count up to 72.5K. I still have about 60 pages to edit and develop, so I’m hoping to get that up to about 76k by the end of October.

I treated myself to a mini writing retreat and booked into a local hotel, where I wrote in my room until midnight without distraction. In fact, I only stopped to go to the curry house attached to the hotel for dinner. As well as getting lots of words done, it also gave me an appreciation of how the characters in my books might feel booking into a hotel as a solo traveller and dining alone. I also saw firsthand how much of a struggle in must be for the hotel industry to keep afloat with few guests – all invaluable experience for the crafting of my new series set in a Cornish hotel.

I would recommend any writer take a similar retreat to focus and recharge, especially if you have a busy home-life.

I still need to write a story for the Advent Calender Story Train and the deadline is looming, plus a Halloween themed story for the library writing group I attend.

The rest of October will be a busy one, especially now I have made an offer to a narrator to perform A Little Christmas Magic – I will keep you updated on the progress.

I still have lots of words to write today and stories to draft. I hope to be back with some late book reviews on my Netgalley reads and hopefully news on the book covers for my Mermaid Hotel Series.

Lastly, I finally got a new laptop! My old one has had a broken ‘down’ button for the last 2-years and the screen had bubbles and was leaking at the edges. Thanks to the recent Amazon Prime day deal, I’m typing this on my lovely new blue Lenovo IdeaPad. So far I’m very happy with it, though the battery life could be a little better.

Until next time…