Our Christmas tree is still sparkling in the corner of our living room, five days later. It was a lovely, busy Christmas with the kids - and I got all three of my knitted gifts finished in time. Whew! :) Now I'm knitting a scarf for myself with the lush, gorgeous cornflower-blue wool that Patrick got me for Christmas, which fills me with utter ( Read more... )

We made it! We're back home in the UK...and oof. It was a rough re-entry, since my older son came down with a terrible case of the rotavirus (stomach flu) on our first night back. We're all still pretty jetlagged, and I'm dealing with with a serious post-travel M.E./CFS crash, but I've also been spending time in our beautiful garden, my parents are ( Read more... )

I finished proofreading my first-pass pages for The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart today, and - embarrassingly or not! - the truth is, I cried at the end.

I love this book. And seeing it laid out in its to-be-published form (in the same typeface as Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, according to my lovely editor at Bloomsbury!) made me feel really ( Read more... )

Whew! It's been a big week. Last Friday I took the train to London to have lunch with my wonderful agent, Molly:


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Aaand whew! The beautiful paperback of Masks and Shadows is finally available in the UK, too! You can order it from Foyles or Amazon UK already (and I hope it'll go live on Waterstones.com and Blackwell's soon, too - for some reason those two sites are still calling it a pre-order for now ( Read more... )

Thank you so much to everyone who commented, emailed me, signal-boosted my book around the internet, bought a copy in your local store or online - basically, everyone who made Masks and Shadows's book birthday such an amazing day for me!

Of course Patrick and I took the book out to celebrate in the morning. ;)


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Masks and Shadows is out in the world today...and I am almost too overwhelmed by emotion to write this post!

But I'm going to share the official blurb for this book...and then the backstory. ;)

Masks and ShadowsThe year is 1779, and Carlo Morelli, the most renowned castrato singer in Europe, has been invited as an honored guest to Eszterháza ( Read more... )

This has been an intense second week of school holidays, with lots of excursions and events to make up for the fact that the kids spent all of last week stuck at home, ill. Between aquarium trips, family swimming expeditions, and more, I'm not even trying to do any writing of my own this week ( Read more... )

So, yesterday began with worries about my older son's health that clung to me all day...but this morning (knock on wood! I hope I'm not jinxing myself by typing this), he woke up without a fever for the first time in six days...and a couple hours later, completing my happiness for the day, I opened up my subscription copy of the April issue of ( Read more... )

Oof. Our big house-move begins tomorrow (it will be a multi-day process!), and the phone line in our house won't start working until over a week later, so I will be offline (and frantically packing/cleaning/unpacking/panicking!) for the next little while. In other words: if you send me a message over the next week and a half and I don't reply, ( Read more... )