Phew! What a Scorcher!

This famous headline which may or may not have actually appeared on the front page of The Sun newspaper, during the two-week long, blistering summer of 1976, is still being talked about fifty years on, as we experience the hottest days in May since UK records began.

Words – good and bad – can have a real impact on their readers. The Sun has found this out in far less favourable ways which I will acknowledge but not dwell on here. For writers, finding a way to describe not only an event, but the way people feel about it, that resonates with us all, is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that appears when we get that welcome relief of rain.

My novel in progress, Miss Wed, is set during last year’s summer of 2025, which was perhaps more remarkable for lasting as long as it did, than the actual temperatures reached. From the day I took early retirement in mid-March, pretty much to the end of September, the sun shone.

I blame the lure of my terrace and a cup of coffee each morning to my book being nowhere near as close to finished as I’d hoped. Most of its eighty thousand plus words were written in the winter, when it was nigh on impossible to remember sticky leather car seats, sweat trickling down the back of my neck and the bright orange glow through my closed eyelids as I sunbathed. Now we’re back here again, I am capturing these thoughts.

Other events have held back my novel writing too. The small matter of my son’s wedding in June this year and a successful bid last week to become a Chartered Public Relations Practitioner. More will follow on both, as will the promised – but also delayed – blog on trading at a book festival.

My online writing community, Keyboard to Kindle, has kept me on course for an anticipated publication date of spring 2027, despite the distractions. Our weekly writing sessions and monthly workshops are a great way of building and maintaining a writing habit, however minimal. Why not join us? As a large supermarket says, ‘every little helps’.