The Authorized Version

Celebrate with me! I just clicked the send button! With a great "Woo-hoo!" AN UNHOLY COMMUNION, book 3 in the Monastery Murders is on its way to the publisher!

Strapline: "A quiet Welsh Pilgrimage becomes a life-and-death struggle between good and evil"

People often ask me how long it takes me to write a book. This one has been quite a model of efficiency. Here’s the saga, beginning with that all-important research trip:

The idea rattled around in my head and in notes on my computer for some time, but by early in 2011 they were well enough formed that I was planning my research trip. I needed two things: to experience a walking pilgrimage to understand how these things worked and to visit southern Wales again to brush up on earlier research I had done there.

Because I am a member of the Guild of Our Lady of Walsingham I knew the pilgrimage I wanted to join: a youthwalk from London to the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk (126 miles) with a group celebrating the 950the anniversary of the founding of the shrine. I applied to join them as an over-age pilgrim and was accepted.

And then a great gift arrived in the form of a simple telephone call on a Sunday afternoon. Dolores Gordon-Smith, my sister mystery writer in Manchester, England, rang to say she would accompany me— more than accompany, she would drive— through Wales.

As soon as my blisters were healed came the writing: through the fall and winter, interspersed with the November birth of a granddaughter in Canada, a lovely family Christmas in Los Angeles and our son’s wedding in Kansas City in January. And yet the story found its inevitable form following Ordnance Survey Explorer maps and with frequent references to my pictures and research notes. Ideally, at the rate of 5 pages a day. Some days.

Then the nerve-wracking waiting to hear from my commissioning editor as he shepherded the proposal through seemingly endless committees across the ocean. And at last, the arrival of the contract bound in its classy cover.

Followed with breathtaking speed by a preview peek at the preliminary cover!

Then more rewriting, again interspersed with family events: birthdays, ballets and concerts in California, a graduation in Indiana.

And today, that wonderful moment of pushing "send." To be followed, of course, by more months of editing and rewriting. Publication date? January 2013.