It is with palpitations of tremulous delight that I announce the text of the book has been copy edited and returned to me! 

To draw back the wafting gauze curtain on the slowly moving forms tentatively coming together on this warm, still summer’s night - during the run of my show Twist at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August of 2023, and for the month afterwards in an airbnb in Italy (surprisingly less glamorous than it sounds), I wrote like a maniac (in deep spiritual interdimensional consultation with D’Ancey LaGuarde the whole time, obviously), and handed in my manuscript at the end of September, then moved to Queensland and had a baby. 

Obviously, narratively speaking, that could be Game Over because obviously I could be living happily ever after, which in Romance Novels is like death but more so. (According to the norms of romance, babies mainly appear in epilogues, and one spends one’s time cooing uneventfully.) 

But I refuse to let the story end, and now with a one-month-old baby and a toddler, I’m entering the pool of New Romance possibilities: from Mafia Don’s Surprise Baby, to Heartwarming Christmas Family Story; to Shirtless Veteran Does Chores for Put-Upon-Hard-Working-Yet-Somehow-Still-Very-Sexy Mother; to Wait Sixteen Years for the Romance Tales of My Children in Which I will Appear to Give Advice. 

Also for those of you wondering what happens now with the book, the copy editor has sent back notes to my editor-editor (did you know those were two different people? I didn’t! They are!), and so now I will get to read through and decide whether to accept the notes or double down on my initial bad instincts and worse choices. 

 

Exciting times, and I’m looking forward to keeping you in the loop with extremely graphic descriptions of the ongoing book-making process as we move closer and closer, knowing it’s a mistake but unable to resist the moment where our lips (your hands) will touch (the book). 

Alice (and D’Ancey)