NOVELTINA LITERARY AND CRITICAL AGENCY

Mudlark Cottage, The Harbour, Shrimphaven

Dear Neville Strudwick,

Thank you for your manuscript, Sons of the Soil, and the cheque.

Yes, I am Tina Devino the novelist, and I’m so glad you enjoy reading my books.

No, surprising as it may seem, I don’t have a huge garden myself – the tiniest seaside pebble and driftwood garden, in fact – but I love visiting gardens and adore flowers, so don’t find the research part of my novels at all difficult.

I look forward to reading your novel.

Yours sincerely,

Tina Devino

I am having a website made! No longer was I a dinosaur, but firmly into the twenty-first century, and Minnie the mouse was proud of me. She was my little mascot, and worth her weight in sunflower seeds and Mousienibs, the Rodent Fitfood.

I saw an advert for someone who specialized in creating author websites and rang up, and this really nice young man came out to see me. I had to give him back, though; they wouldn’t let me keep him.

He was going to put these links on the Net, like ‘Sexy Flowers’ and ‘Hot Beds’, and all the details and covers of my books, and my reviews … and then I’d have even more mentions on Google! Hurray!

I heard at last from Salubrious about Dark, Passionate Earth – but not from Tim the Suit, just that little anxious-looking girl who took me to lunch. Jinni, was it? Anyway, she said it just needed a little tweaking here and there, nothing much, and was I happy to let her do it? Only they had decided to bring publication day forward to June in both hardback and paperback, so it was going to be a bit tight.

So I said yes, it certainly was! And my previous books had always come out in hardback just in time for Christmas and paperback early the following spring, like the aptly named Spring Breezes, and why were they changing that?

‘It’s a managerial decision,’ she said reverently. ‘I’m just passing on the message. So it’s all right for me to go ahead with the changes, is it?’

‘No, it certainly isn’t,’ I informed her crisply. ‘I want to see the whole manuscript and make any strictly necessary changes myself.’

She’d obviously been told to avoid this at all costs, but she wasn’t up to the job because there was no way I was letting that happen. So the upshot was that the manuscript with notes arrived by motorcycle courier not much more than two hours later, and it was just as well I insisted because the copy-editor had changed all my half-French hero’s dialogue, which I had written with the merest hint of an accent, to something farcically ‘’Allo ’Allo, zis is ’ow you are saying I am loving you, chérie?’ style.