LIZ FIELDING

ITALY, HUGH JACKMAN & THE WIP...

I started writing at the crack of dawn this morning to avoid the heat. Apparently it’s going to be in the mid-thirties this week. Just the thought of that makes me want to lie down in a darkened room and not move until it rains.

Ungrateful? Probably. We don’t get this kind of undiluted sunshine often, but I have an end of August deadline and I’m still only on chapter three. Lazy afternoons in the shade with a book (not my own) are not an option. Not if I’m going to get to Italy (purely for research purposes, you’ll understand) in September. And, talking of Italy, for those of you lucky enough to live there, I have a book on sale there this month! I haven’t got my author copies yet, but, as with the Greek, if you are Italian, want to improve your Italian, or know someone Italian who would like a copy, speak up and I’ll reserve a copy for you,

But back to the wip. I have, thanks to Ally Blake pointing me in the right direction on the net, now found some photographs that are about as close as I’m going to get to my hero, the distant and ice-cold Ivo Grenville. His eyes are the wrong colour, but that’s okay. I can live with this picture of Hugh Jackman on my board for the next couple of months (sigh); I’ll imagine him with eyes the colour of the sea.

And for his heroine Belle, well, I have a tear-sheet from a magazine to thank for her; as you can see, she’s a bit of a bombshell babe.

In my head, I’m calling this book The Journey Home. The journey is, in fact, internal and I’ve teamed up with Barbara Hannay in Australia and Jackie Braun in America to write linked stories of three women who are making that journey back in time to a point where each of them made a decision – one that they now regret -- that had a major impact on their lives. Confronting the past will take courage, deeply affecting the lives they have now, the future beyond imagining.

At least, that’s the plan. If the heat doesn’t fry my brain first.