Two to Tango...

Was at one point going to be the name of this book, but I'm definitely going with my ed here, when she feels we should adopt a Strictly theme, so Strictly Love is where we're at currently...

I mention the tango because I tried to make my husband learn it with me last week. To be honest, my timing wasn't great. It was late, we'd had rather a lot of red, and the tango is a slightly odd dance. In a way you don't dance at all. You walk. Sideways. With your faces stuck together like glue. And when you start off, according to Izobela you have to lean your head backwards in most awkward fashion, keeping it over your left hip. So we didn't make a terribly good fist of the tango, it has to be said.

However two can tango in quite other ways too, especially when you have four children and one of you gets given an urgent deadline on a book, as happened to us the other week.

It was my fault really. I'd had the comments from my ed sitting on my desk for several weeks, but other work had got in the way, then half term, then my husband took time off over his birthday, and suddenly, I was slightly up against it. Slightly up against it? I was pressed flat against a brick wall with my nose squashed more like.

So, I had an utterly surreal weekend at the computer. Normally Saturday morning is spent ferrying children to their various activities, and as there is one point during the morning when three of them have to be in different places at the SAME time, we both have to take part in this parental servitude. However, thank the lord, on this particular occasion, one was ill, one hurt her foot and the other couldn't face going so we left them to watch tv, while I slaved away.

I was painfully aware when I was writing the first draft that lack of time had left me to skimp on the research. And I knew there were two main areas where I needed to show a bit more proper depth. The first was in the area of legal expertise. I am not a lawyer, but one of my heroines is. Luckily a writing friend had answered my early questions about stuff, but I was horribly conscious I had written some court room scenes that were more Judge John Deeds then anything else. I sent them to her, and to my good blogging friend Political Umpire (also a lawyer) and they both sent me word that on more then one point I had gone horribly awry. Most of the points they raised were eminently fixable, but a couple gave me a huge headache as they were crucial to the plot and I had a fiendish time trying to work out what the hell I could get my characters to do instead. I think I solved both problems, I hope the legal bits now work better, and if they don't well, I fess up here and now that that is entirely my fault...

The second area slightly lacking was the dancing. In fact for a book about dancing, there wasn't nearly enough in it. We need more dancing, said my ed. Yes, of course, so we do, said I. Thinking, help........ Most of the dancing bits had been written cribbing from Marie Phillips' fantastically funny reviews of the last series of Strictly Come Dancing on her blog. I found myself frantically reviewing them again, plus bombarding her with questions about the sexiest dance I could watch to draw inspiration from (Flavia and Vincent dancing the Argentinian tango, if you want to know. I will try and post it here, but You Tube seems to send my videos to the other blog for some reason). I also trawled the web for online dance classes, dance clothing sites, and even tapped out the dance moves on my own. Actually if anyone had been noticing when I took the children to their tennis class the previous Thursday, I was actually sitting there, with my laptop and a dancing book, tracing steps out under the table. Honestly, this writing malarkey makes madmen of us all. Sometimes I think I'm seriously bonkers.

Even more bonkers was the realisation at one point I had actually CRIED as I wrote a tearjerky scene (yes, well probably the prose was that dire too), but with any luck if it made me cry it might possibly have the same effect on readers. Or alternatively they can always cry with laughter.

Anyway, I did it, eventually. And my other half manfully coped with cooking and laundry and children for the weekend.

So, like I say, it takes two to tango.

Although, his method of getting the children to sort out the laundry (go and find your own things and put them away, without supervision) does leave something to be desired...

But if only I could get him to dance the way he does domesticity, my cup of happiness would be complete...