Hubble Bubble countdown - plus a teeny, tiny extract to whet your appetites. But, apparently, no diamonds....

It has come to my attention that it is not that very many weeks now until Hubble Bubble leaps into life before your very eyes.  Or after your eyes, if you've had a night on the ginger beer and HobNobs, as has so many times been the occasion in this very house.  So I thought, for anyone interested in my wandering processes, that you may like to have some sneaky-peeks in between those glorious pages.

Well, firstly, there is a page that looks like this





It's the page that goes between the one with the acknowledgement on and the actual words.  It isn't, you will be glad to know, the most exciting page in the book. Unless you get really excited about blank space, which I know some people do.  Brian Cox, for example, he's really, really interested in space, and I may try to persuade him to buy this book just for the bits that come at the end of every sentence and between the words.  He'll like those more than the words themselves.

Ah, to the words!  There are many occasions of words in the book.

The fridge had definitely exploded. The small squat box, now minus a corner, leaned slightly forward into a green patch of ooze, sides bulging and its front flapping from one impotent hinge. It looked like R2-D2 after a really hard night on the Crème de Menthe. I bent and tugged at the line of rubber door seal, which pinged sullenly back at me. ‘What the hell did you have in there, fusion fuel?’
Megan looked at her toes and mumbled something. Her black curls fell over her pretty-pug face but I could see she was blushing by the darkening shade of the mocha-coffee skin visible between her hair and the back of her neck.
‘And since when did you eat’—I held up a dripping fast food wrapper between finger and thumb—‘this kind of stuff?’
Her mutters became more audible but more defensive. ‘It was the last meal Tom and I had before he …’
‘Stop trailing off when you talk about him as though he went off to a tragic hero’s death! He’s living in Wolverhampton, and he’d been two-timing you, and she’s a topless model.’ Only my best friend could keep the leftovers of the meal during which she split up with her boyfriend. Only she could keep them until they went critical, anyway. ‘Oh, Meg,’ I said helplessly. ‘If ever there was a man who’d had his chips, it was him.’ I picked up a newspaper from the recycling pile and began scraping unidentified runny stuff off the floor of Megan’s otherwise pristine kitchen.
‘I don’t know why I asked you over. I knew you wouldn’t understand, Holly. You are very unsympathetic. I think it’s because you don’t get attached to men like I do.’ She clasped her forehead dramatically. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be in love.’

These, those words there, those very words, are the opening to the book! Obviously when you read them within the covers they will look different, they will be carved on solid silver sheets and inset with gold and precious gems, diamond, ruby you know the kind of ...oh, hang on.  Phone call from my publisher...

Well, that's embarrassing.  Due to difficulties sourcing silver sheets, gold inlay and diamonds they've had to cut back on producing my book in the aforementioned version, and it will only be available in the conventional 'paper/ink' layout.

How vexing.