appy New Year! I hope 2008 is a good one for you. Mine didn't start off too brilliantly - I went to watch my team, Huddersfield Town, play Nottingham Forest on New Year's Day and Forest won 2-1 by scoring in the 92nd minute. Arghh!

2008 is going to be a busy one for me. In February, my new book for young adults, Accidental Friends, is out in the shops. I can't wait! This book took me such a long time to write - over fifteen months - and I went through so many twists and turns with it that I find it hard to believe it is actually coming out at all. But coming out it is. Yey! Check out the Nottingham branch of Waterstone's for details of the launch on February 8th ( ). I hope people will like it just as much as I do. Basically, Accidental Friends is a multi narrative around four characters, three of who have just received their GCSE results and one who didn't take any.

Remember waiting for your GCSE results? Or perhaps you are about to take them? Those of you in Y11 will already be feeling the pressure. You'll be returning to school with your parents nagging you about revising and your teachers nagging you about coursework and you and your friends stressed out with it all. By June it will all be over then all you have to do is wait for the results. The waiting seems to take forever; all through July then almost the whole of August.

Then comes the day of the results. What will you do? Have them sent by e-mail? Post? Or will you go into school and collect them, making your mum wait outside in the car park while you search for your envelope, fearful yet excited? Writers thrive on 'what if' scenarios and opening that envelope is laden with them. What if the results are rubbish? Or brilliant? Or go missing? What if you did fantastically well but your mate, standing next to you, didn't? Or vice versa? That was my starting point for my four characters. Intriguing, huh? I think so!

OUP are also publishing Never Ever and Getting Rid of Karenna, my previous teen reads, with new covers to match that of Accidental Friends. A word of warning: Getting Rid of Karenna has been re-titled Saturday Girl so if you have already read Getting Rid of Karenna don't go buying Saturday Girl thinking it's a brand new title. Unless you want the snazzy new cover, of course!

am also going to have a busy 2008 because Walker Books have bought the rights to my new series based around a girls' football team. Helen Reagan, who used to work in the foreign rights department at Oxford University Press, gave me the idea a few years ago but it's taken me until now to get round to it. I think the idea is a corker and one no one has done it, as far as I know. The only title I can think of is Narinder Dhami's 'Bend it like Beckham', based on the screenplay of the film but that's aimed at an older readership and more about a clash of cultures than football (still a breakthrough, funny film, though).

Girls' football is the fastest growing sport in the world. Thousands of girls play it every week in the UK alone. Lets just hope thousands of girls want to read about it, too! There will be twelve books in the series, each one about a different player on the team.

The tricky part for me is that although I have always liked watching football I have never played and I can't pretend I'm an expert by any stretch of the imagination. If I'm interviewed and someone asks me about the offside rule I'm busted! Luckily at U11 level, usually played as a seven-a-side game, the offside rule doesn't apply. Phew! However, I still want to make the passages where I'm describing an actual match or training session as authentic as possible so I am immersing myself in the sport big time. This means:

• Watching SkySports midweek and reading match reports every Sunday
• Reading non-fiction books on the subject. So far:
  • Three Lions on her Shirt by Catherine Etoe and Natalia Sollohub
  • How to improve at Football - Ticktock books
  • Eyewitness Football - Dorling Kindersley
  • Football Lexicon - Leigh and Woodhouse
• Watching girls Under 11s teams whenever I can. I must thank Phil Hukin and everyone at Lincoln Griffins and Pat Douglas and Faith Monaghan at Collingham FC for allowing me to observe them. I have learned so much since October already!

ad news. After writing the above copy for my diary, my grandma died. She was 93 and a huge influence on my life. I often talked about her on my school visits and I'll miss her tremendously. One of the hardest things I had to do, apart from organising her funeral (the story of which will one day be a book in itself) was to return her library books. My grandma was an avid reader and luckily Newark Library has a good selection of large print books. Grandma was picky though - the book had to be romance but not set in a hospital, the past or written by Catherine Cookson. Anything else was fine. Apologies to the kind librarian on the Enquiries Desk when I had to hand in Grandma's library ticket and also confess that 'The Bartered Bride' had gone missing before bursting into tears.

All the best for 2008 everybody,