Dear Visitor,

It’s about a month since I last wrote, so technically this newsletter isn’t late, but since it’s well past the middle of February, I am going to let this update run through March, and try really, really hard to get the next update in for the first week in April.

So what news do I have? Well, Ottaker’s bookshops have chosen Births, Deaths and Marriages as a July book of the month, so that’s good, and the UK paperback will be out that month, if anyone wants to buy it. And since Ottaker’s have done me a good turn, I’ll do them one – if there’s a branch near you, please get it from them, and buy lots of other books while you’re there!

And a Finnish reader tells me that A Shred of Evidence – the Lloyd and Hill TV adaptation – has been shown on Finnish TV, which is great. It made me reflect on how insular we are in this country – can you imagine any TV channel here showing a one-off Finnish adaptation of a book written by a Finnish midlist author who wasn’t even published here? No, neither can I. And I freely confess that if any of them did, I wouldn’t be setting my video – I’m as insular as the next Briton. But I’m very glad that other countries are a little more open to foreign entertainment than we are.

I don’t know if they used subtitles or if Michelle Collins was apparently speaking Finnish, but I kind of hope it was the latter. I expect it was Michelle who did the trick – I imagine her TV series will sell well abroad, and her name above the title would catch the buyer’s eye. So let’s hope other countries follow suit – you never know, it might turn into a series yet!

The Finnish reader who told me this was one of the winners of the January competition – I’m really pleased with the response the new competition is getting. This one had another big postbag, and this time the winners were from the USA, Canada, Finland and the UK. I was particularly pleased about the UK winners – not since the winner of the very first competition have I even had an entry from the UK. First editions of Death in the Family will be going to the overseas winners, and of Births, Deaths and Marriages to the UK winners. If you weren’t a winner – or even if you were – try again this month. You’ve got a little bit longer this time to work out what the picture is!

What else? Oh yes – as a result of writing queries I’ve received, I’ve added two topics – short stories and creating characters – to the writing advice pages, so if you’re interested in fiction writing, you might want to take a look. The advice given on the site is of necessity very brief and basic, but over the last few years I have been putting together a book which covers in depth every aspect of writing fiction – it isn’t quite finished (and won’t be until Number Thirteen is safely with the publisher), but I hope to do something with it this year if possible. If I do, I promise you’ll be the first to know!

One other thing - if you’ve tried to join the mailing list without success, have another go, please. Someone reported to me that it wasn’t working, and it was fixed that same day, but I don’t know how long it had been playing up before I knew about it.

I think that’s it. It’ll be coming up to Easter the next time I write to you – I tell you, this planet is spinning faster on its axis. That’s why people live almost twice as long as they did in the middle ages – it isn’t the diet, or the environment, or the medical advances. It’s just that there are fewer hours in the day, and annual celebrations are actually coming round every six months. Think about it. It explains everything.

Love,

Jill

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