She sat before her mirror, gazing thoughtfully at the familiar face. Not the kind of face men adored, she thought, poking at her full lips, and impatiently brushing back her magnificent auburn mane. Just a regular face, nothing special. Her eyebrows were too dark for beauty, and her nose was slightly too straight… and those violet eyes for which she’d been bullied at school were the bane of her existence. She sighed, creamy bosom heaving, if only she were the glamorous dark-haired flat-chested figure that fashion demanded, instead of this juicy-bosomed, tight-waisted yawnfest…

Oh sorry! I didn’t notice you there reading! I was just thinking about how far we’ve come with the book. All the writing’s done, though I keep thinking of extra bits I could just…(!!!!).

We’re now in the middle of putting together the illustrations for the book. That’s a mixture of the excellent in-house Unbound art director putting together cover designs to my deranged briefs: 'Can we have a cow benevolently looking over Lord Pranceling’s shoulder… yes, but more floating in the air sort of like Mufasa in The Lion King?', 'More tentacles!'; independent artist Rosie Mullender putting together the double-page spread of The Lost Duke to my deranged brief: 'Can the young footman on the left holding the tray look like he’s secretly a young heiress in disguise and also falling in love with that handsome lord holding a pistol?'; me discovering that it is impossible to explain some of the ideas I have, and taking it into my own clumsy hands to draw, for example, Sebastian, who is half leopard, half underwear model, and all hunk.

Or a werewolf highlander who is in love with a samurai vampire.

Anyway, it’s all exciting and Unbound had me give a little talk to their people about romance and comedy and the respectability of genre fiction, and in return I’m learning all about their arcane lore: lead times for sell-in, printing, production, editorial and so on. It’s fascinating to see behind the curtain of how a book gets made. Turns out it’s not as simple as you write a book, give it to your editor and then … a book appears, which TBH is probably what I thought when I hadn’t thought about it very much.

It’s been really nice to learn about the ‘backstage’ of publishing, if that’s what it’s called (it isn’t) so I can bring even more good info to my Patreon writers group, and to keep pushing the envelope by trying to find the outer limits of what’s too silly an idea to publish.