My Favourite Month? (Cecilia Peartree)

April has usually been my favourite month, partly because of the rapidly lengthening hours of daylight and partly because my birthday falls in approximately the middle of it, around the time of the anniversaries of the Lincoln assassination, the sinking of the Titanic and the Battle of Culloden!  So far April 2023 has been the worst April of my life, with a broken hip landing me in hospital for the first half of the month, but I must admit April 2025 wasn't one of the great Aprils either. This was partly because we had three committee meetings instead of just one, and one of them was actually held on my birthday, partly because the pollen count was particularly high and partly because I found myself - not entirely accidentally - working on two novels at the same time.

I had started the month determined to finish the Regency novel set in Cornwall which I had started around Christmas, because I was beginning to hate it, which is usually a sign I have spent too long on something. Fortunately this feeling vanished as soon as I had written 'The End' on the first draft, even if I already knew I had left myself some difficult things to sort out in the edit. It was one of those novels that I thought I might never reach the end of, as the final outcome seemed to be getting further and further away as I wrote. My novels are often on the short side, about 60,000 - 70,000 words, so anything much over that is too long, as far as I'm concerned. Still, anything set in the past often works out longer, because of more convoluted speech patterns and the need to describe some of the background things such as curricles and, in this case, ferries. The novel is set around the Tamar estuary, so there are lots of ferries, and opportunities for bad things to happen in the river. I think what's shown here is the final cover design.

In a cunning plan to stop myself from getting bored with the edit, and because I woke up in the middle of the night in about the middle of April with a 'great' idea for the 29th novel in my mystery series, I decided to spend some of my writing time making a start on that. To my amazement, both parts of this plan have worked well. Today I reached the final stage of my edit, despite being somewhat distracted by crows fighting in the garden and one of them coming too close for comfort to crashing through the conservatory roof. Fortunately neither of the crows in question got inside the conservatory this time - I still haven't recovered from that incident. Tomorrow I'll start the formatting, while I have about 18,000 words of the mystery done and an interesting scenario set up. 

In an unexpected bonus, which I hope is a sign that May will be better than April this year, I've realised the Regency novel set in Cornwall will be eligible to enter the Kindle Storyteller competition. For the last few years I haven't published anything on KDP Select at the right time of year to enter, and if there's one thing I enjoy almost as much as writing, it's entering competitions.

Birthday tulips with artificial poinsettia