Blogging at Romance Vagabonds

Today is the Other Time Period day at Romance Vagabonds. On offer is a signed copy of Taken by the Viking...
Also I would be delighted to chat about other time periods, research...switching periods...anything really.
Then tomorrow, I am Tote Bags & Blogs. And on Sunday I am doing a launch for Taken by the Viking on Unusual Historicals. So there are lots of places to win a signed copy.
In between all this, I need to finish my latest Viking. I know I have been thinking this for several weeks and it is one of those things -- no two manuscripts are written the same. This one went quickly at the beginning but now feels like it is going slowly. And I suspect that it will need a lot of editing. Very curate's egg -- some parts very good, other parts not so good. But the polishing and editing comes later. When writing the first draft, you have to concentrate on getting the semblance of a story down. Things like repetition and circular dialogue can be fixed. And sometimes, it is a function of not knowing where it exactly goes. Also I am not one of those people who thinks that there should be little or no revision. Books are made in the revising process. It does not have to be perfect the first time. No book is ever stamped -- it took the writer 50 goes to get this sentence correct.
Duck update: they seem to be resigned to having their access to the neighbours' garden curtailed. I do not think any duck is sitting.The latest nest was discovered in the bee garden and done away with...The other good part is the sky rocketing price of grain seems to have stabilised and stopped. It remains 50% more than this time last year. I suspect most of the increase has yet to reach the UK supermarket shelves as most commercial farmers buy their grain forward...and the supermarkets also negotiate a fixed price. But it is coming. The increase in the grain price is due to the increase in bio fuels and poor harvest, but bio fuels are a major contributing factor...