Greetings Fellow Earthlings and wishing you all good things for 2021!

It’s been a rocky start in our neck of the woods, culminating with one of our schnauzer sisters enduring a serious operation to remove two nasty tumours and her spleen. Waiting now for test results and hoping they are benign.

In human years she is only 53 years old, so you’ll appreciate she is still very young!

In breaking news mountains of gherkins dominate my veggie garden. I can’t keep up with the pickling! Those left on the vine appear to expand overnight into fully-fledged cucumbers. There’s only so much blue cheese and gherkins a girl can eat!

I’ve had time to think about my progress and have decided to unpublish the Deep End series of two books and rework the content. Write a new Book One and turn the series into a trilogy with a new cover, title etc. I’ve spent the holidays reading and rewriting them. The other realization is they’re not Romance! So, will be re-categorising the genre on Amazon in the hope I can get more traction.

Have managed 17,000 words in my new series, ‘Crow’s Song.’ I am working on Book Two in the active first-person voice of a boy, Piet, during WWII in the Netherlands and have made a start on Book Three, a girl, Ava, in WWII during the London bombing (7,000 words). By Book Three, the two teenagers meet and immigrate to NZ. Book Three features NZ during the 1960s. In case you’re wondering about Book One, I have plotted out the storyline and will write it last. It’s like eating the vegies and working my way towards the meat and gravy. The pudding, however, will be Book Five and Six, pulling the story into contemporary Kiwi life with flashbacks to some Maori ancestry driving this family saga. Major archives of historical research to climb. Feeling the pressure!

But hope you’ve had a better start to 2021 and aren’t feeling any pressure … yet!

See, not one mention of that damn virus!

All the very best and ENJOY!

Nicky

Nicky Webber, New Zealand Author of Contemporary Fiction