Any girl who's reached the age Of seventeen or thereabouts Has but one desire in view She knows she has reached the stage Of needing one to care about Nothing else will really do We've got to have, We plot to have, For it's a dreary not to have That certain thing called The Boy Friend. - Sandy Wilson, The Boy Friend musical 💞 S eventeen? I was still in love with Ricky Nelson at seventeen! No, the boyfriend thing didn’t happen for me until I was twenty-one, and even then it was a long-distance romance with a lovely Spaniard from Seville named Juan-Bosco Fernandez Vial (my mum called him Bosco the Biscuit). I met him in 1965 on the island of Menorca, and for 10 glorious days we danced in the moonlight, kissed on the beach, held hands walking the cobbled streets, and I sobbed all the way home on the plane. I hasten to add, though, there was no hanky-panky. No siree, none at all. I was still a virgin and somewhat teased for it by my far more adventurous London fl...
Leo turned into a teenager last week. Ah, you say, so into a kid who will now only answer in monosyllables when he's not giving you sass; get miffed if you tell him to turn off his phone/tablet/gamer; and generally behave as though you, his parent or grandparent, knows nothing at all about anything. But Leo is not that kind of kid; and for us as grandparents taking him on his first trip abroad to a non-English speaking country, we found this out on the very first day of his being in our care for the first time without his parents. (That's a lot of firsts.) We flew overnight on French Bee from Miami to Paris Orly and landed on June 6th--at the start of a one-day General Strike. Ack! Les Français et ses grèves. We had no idea what to expect, but that things were not as they usually are on a Tuesday in June became evident as we sat on the plane for an hour and a half waiting to disembark. Our jetway was not ready (not enough personnel willing to work) and so portable stairs had ...
A s many of you who prefer listening to a reading have probably noticed, the narrator can make or break a book. The narrator for my first books was the award-winning former actor Rosalyn Landor. She made my characters come alive so well that I was pleased and proud of her work. The same cannot be said for Royal Mistress! Despite my agent's insistence that the contract with Audible included hiring Roz Landor again, they ignored her and me and the result was not as pleasing IMHO. When it came to This Son of York 's publishing process, as many of you know, I was on my own; like so many of my fellow writers subject to the vagaries of traditional publishers, I was left out to dry. The result was contracting with Bellastoria Press , a small independent publisher, who did a beautiful job on creating and distributing the print and ebook versions, albeit leaving me alone to do marketing. But when it came to an audiobook, my husband and I thought long and hard as to whether to invest...
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