Plus I’d started getting rude emails from companies who pretended to be my friends, so I opened them, but after the first couple – and my God, were they pornographic! – I was much more cautious and deleted anything that looked the least bit dodgy. Only then they started sending me blatantly obvious messages, and why target someone called Tina with men’s porno? Enlarge your penis by three inches in one week? I don’t think so, thank you very much.

I needed to ask Mel if there was a way of getting rid of them. At least now I knew what people meant by spam because I’d seen it only too clearly on my screen.

I was having lots of what Mel calls ‘hits’ on my new website, also more emails, though, and I could see why that nice man who set the site up said I should have a separate email address on it instead of my own personal one, because some of the messages were very odd indeed; but then, I suppose the links were too, so I couldn’t complain, so long as they bought the books after visiting the site.

I met Ramona Gullet for coffee at the Jolly Fisherman and she signed my copy of Blood on the Table and I signed Spring Breezes for her. We were forming a mutual admiration society, and decided to meet like that once a month.

I told her all about my attempts to find another agent, and how Miracle seemed to be changing her mind a bit now I was having all this press coverage and Spring Breezes was doing well, but I had absolutely lost faith in her and if only I could find another agent who would take me on I would go anyway.

Ramona had a wonderful agent, but he specialized in crime and thrillers, not my kind of thing at all, though she said she would ask him if he knew any other agents who might be interested, which was kind of her.

Then we settled down for a good novelists’ gossip, which was a lot of fun, and though I loved Linny to bits and she was writing novels, until she was published and understood the whole business more we couldn’t really have this type of conversation, which refreshed the parts non-writers couldn’t reach and sent me back to my keyboard and mouse(es) rejuvenated.

By the time I got home, the remains of the day were an offal-coloured heap of tangled clouds on the horizon and until I managed to throw off the dark but interesting influence of Ramona’s conversation, The Orchid Huntress took a very odd turn indeed.

Thirteen

I Should Be So Lucky