March Madness

March madness for me has included revisions on next year’s new publication – this now has a name – hurrah! From Venice With Love…

It has involved writing some articles and short stories – most of these will be published in June to cleverly coincide with the paperback edition of The Lemon Tree Hotel, but one exception was a 4 page spread in YOU magazine in Mail on Sunday a couple of weekends ago about a fifties gap year in a camper-van that I took with my husband Grey (who wasn’t my husband then, so it wasn’t all bad). It just shows that everything can be material – even 10 years later! And it surprised me how much I enjoyed re-visiting this experience 🙂

But my main March mission was researching for a new book… The book is going to be set in Seville, I’ve worked out a storyline but I haven’t started writing it yet (see above ;)). So, we went to Seville to visit the city – which is beautiful – to a nearby organic orange farm called Huerta Ave Maria, to Cordoba, Cadiz, Mazagon and Donana national Park. Yes, it was pretty full on. And HOT, let me tell you.

My main character Holly will be buying organic oranges from the lovely people at the Farm and importing them to Dorset where she will be using them to make Seville Orange marmalade. She will also be buying in neroli fragrances and soaps (fun research!) and orange wine (even more fun research). There are over 40,000 bitter orange trees in Seville and right now many of them are out in flower. The scent is heavenly.

I hope I’ll be able to get some of that heavenly scent into my book when I come to write it. Working title: The Bitter Oranges of Seville.

Head down then…