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The night is drawing nigh, my dears. Huddle within your neopropalene blankets and gaze into the eldritch depths of the sputtering fire, while outside the wolves howl and the snow...err... snows. I have further tales to tell. Light the lamps to keep the dark without and I shall lay bare my story.

Reversing Over Liberace had been written in the heady days when I was contracted to an agent (see yesterday’s blog for the teary story of how this ended). I had been lurking around the Friends Reunited website for a while, waiting until I was rich and famous and could therefore make all my old acquaintances feel inadequate. One day a question bobbed up in my mind like something nasty that’s been lurking around a lavatorial U-bend after a hard night on the curry.

What would I do if someone (mentioning no names, but his initials are SIMON) that I’d had a huge crush on back in college but who ignored me completely, suddenly got in touch? And this time around he was besotted with me?

Well, bearing in mind that he’s probably got a 50 inch waist, no hair and nineteen children (I have no empirical proof that this is the case, you understand. He just looked the type), not a lot. And, that taking one look at my current photograph (the waist is still in place, just, and I have all my own hair but as the years go by I look more and more like a pig-slaughterer in drag), he’d suddenly change his mind.

But – what if?

What would I do? Would I wonder, why this sudden change of heart? And what might make someone fancy a person they’d barely acknowledged ten years before, even if they have all their own hair and a waist they can still find, albeit with a guidebook?

And so, I set out to explore this. In fiction, obviously, no way am I going to track down that poor misguided idiot who never noticed the way my tongue used to loll out of my mouth whenever I saw him.... Actually, thinking about it, perhaps that was my mistake. Perhaps he thought I had some peculiar affliction, or was perpetually licking chocolate off the sides of my face. And, come to think of it, I used to carry this enormous rucksack, which made me hunch forward like I was in training to become an Igor.

Apart from this, I was devastatingly attractive, though. Obviously. I mean, you can still see it, can’t you? Look, if I turn this way, and hold my head up...here...turn that lamp down a bit... There. Still got it.

So, I invented Willow Cayton, a confused young woman, with three older brothers and an older sister, two best friends and the tendency to throw up on men she finds attractive. I gave her the throwing up thing to explain why she wasn’t attached, why she found it hard to ‘get’ men. She keeps away from nice men because she vomits on them. Until she meets up, again, with the guy she’d had a huge crush on. Luke Fry. Only now he’s swearing that he fancied her all along.

Sigh. This never happens in real life, does it? It does? Oh. Just not to me, then.

So, why does he fancy her now? Well, that was the motivation I had to figure out. So I began the book with a line that I’d had scribbled in my little pink book (see yesterday’s blog for details). It was a line that had sprung into my head one day whilst I was busy getting on with life... I don’t know what I was doing. Gambling away my life savings on the outcome of Celebrity Sword-Juggling, probably. Anyway. I’d written this line “My Grandfather’s left me his nose. It’s in a matchbox.” And then I had to figure out why the bequest of a nose might make someone fall in love with you. Presuming that they weren’t the sufferers from one of the more virulent sexually transmitted diseases, those ones which make your nose fall off and your ears turn inside out or something and therefore in need of a new nasal organ. Because sufferers from sexually transmitted diseases don’t make great romantic heroes... Hey! What was I doing here? Was I writing romance? How did that come about?

And tomorrow, my smooth-skinned young ones, I shall tell you about The Great Genre Struggle of 2000. Now, as the lamps burn down, let us crouch together in the last of the firelight, toasting the last few marshmallows and having a quick quaff of the elderberry and parsnip wine. It’s disgusting, but hell, after a few glasses, who cares?