lied about the RSI (see November's newsletter). I have something that sounds much better - supraspinatus tendinitis. I think it just means I have torn a muscle in my right shoulder but when it's in Latin it sounds so much more serious and dignified doesn't it? My arm does not hurt quite as much now when I type so I am on the mend. It helped that I finished 'Starring Brody' before Christmas and I planned out 'Starring Alex', the third book in the After School Club series, on A3 paper. Luckily I am left-handed so that part didn't hurt at all.

January and February are months when I do not do school visits so I can get some uninterrupted writing time. That is the idea, anyway. Some days are easier than others. On a good day, I begin writing as soon as the kids have left for school at 7.45 am and go right through to lunchtime without stopping, then return to it in the evening. Today though, I feel as energetic and creative as a lump of lard and only managed a bit of a tinker with my story - deleting a few sentences here, changing a couple of words there. When it won't come, it won't come and I might as well go off and do the ironing.

Still, even 'lump of lard' days can be productive. The best ideas come when you are not looking for them. This Sunday, for instance, found me with my sister in the Memorial Hall running a table in the table top sale (OK, it's not a thrilling thing to do - I live in a village - what can I tell you?) Anyway, now that my grandma is in a nursing home I had to sell all the things she no longer needed. If you have a grandma or great grandma in her mid-eighties you know what that entails: a 'dog' with floppy ears and a hole in its back that you drape over the arm of your chair to put your drink in, every item in the Bettaware catalogue (x2), four unused plastic holly wreaths, every video every made starring Claude Van Damme and about a hundred hardback books by popular women writers (including Jilly Cooper but excluding Catherine Cookson).

Now the TableTop Sale, (see also car boot, jumble and January) is never less than harvest time for the writer. Stuck for an original character - go to a TTS. Need some dialogue (humorous/irritated/vernacular) - TTS. All life is there. I will give you but one example as I am saving the others for when my supra-whatsit really takes hold and I can produce only short stories for the Woman's Realm.

A lady was browsing my grandma's Penny Jordans and telling me how she always reads best before she goes to sleep. 'It goes back to when I was little and my mother wouldn't let me borrow books from the library because she said they were full of germs. I was so desperate to read I forged her signature and sneaked the books into the house, reading them under my bedcovers in secret. To this day I feel as if I'm doing something I shouldn't.'

Isn't that amazing? Luckily for me most parents aren't so anxious or I wouldn't get any PLR. Every year, writers receive something called PLR (Public Lending Rights) based on how many books were borrowed from certain libraries in the UK. The amount has gone up for the year 2002 from 2.67 pence per loan to 4.21 pence. Writers share that with their illustrators (usually 50-50 depending on the balance between text and illustrations) but it is still a wonderful bonus to receive, especially after Christmas. It also reflects how well titles are or are not doing. Here are my figures for 2002 compared to 2001:

Needless to say I was well chuffed this year, especially as those figures took me into the bottom third of the top 1500 most borrowed authors out of the 19,064 surveyed. So if you want to do a good deed for the day that is free, educational and entertaining, go to your local library and help feed those starving writers - borrow, borrow, borrow!

March is the beginning of my school visits season. I start with a trip to Hertfordshire, followed by Solihull, Surrey and Deeping St James. Get the coffee on, everybody - milk, no sugar, heavy on the caffeine!