KEY POINTS:
There are those who think writing has to be a tortured process with the author frowning in front of a computer screen from morning to night hoping for creative inspiration.
But for UK chick-lit queen Catherine Alliott, it's not like that at all.
She's been producing feel-good fiction
for 18 years now - pretty much since the genre was invented - and it sounds like an idyllic life.
On fine summer mornings she sits in the garden writing longhand in an exercise book and in winter she camps in front of the fire.
"In the early days I wrote only in the mornings so I could spend afternoons with my babies. When my publisher asked if I could speed it up a bit, I said no," Alliott explains in her posh accent from her home in rural Hertfordshire.
"But now the children have been at boarding school for years and I've got no excuse - I'm just lazy, so I've stuck to that morning routine.
"I like to have a life - after all if you don't live, you've got nothing to write about."
It's when she's having coffee with friends or mixing with the local pony club mums that Alliott trawls for material for her stories.
"I collect nuggets," she says. "I never use a whole situation, just the spark of an idea, and I'm careful not to portray anyone too minutely.
"But I do very little research, it's all based on everyday life. I'm chronicling the milieu I know about, so it's reasonably affluent and middle class."
The plot of her latest and 10th novel, The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton (Penguin, $37), came from a true story she heard from one of the builders who was renovating her house.
The book is a fun read, poignant and humorous, about a fairly hapless woman whose world is rocked when she and her husband discover he has a grown-up daughter conceived during an infidelity in the early days of their relationship.
How Evie deals with this revelation fills more than 500 easily turned pages.
One of the more charming things about the book is that, rather like the author herself, Evie's character is unfashionably lazy. Instead of battling to succeed in every area of her life - raising perfect kids, meeting career goals, throwing fabulous dinner parties - Evie has a fondness for sneaking back to bed in the mornings to read and eat lime cream lollies.
"She's not a modern heroine, but a lot of my girls aren't," says Alliott.
"This myth of having it all is not how I live my life and I think there's an element in a lot of us not to want to be too modern.
"It's nice to have some me-time and many of my books are about finding that balance."
As she's got older, says Alliott, the themes of her stories have become slightly heavier, dealing more with family dynamics than fluffy romance.
"Looking back now on my first novel The Old-Girl Network, it seems very slapstick," she says. "Perhaps life is just funnier when you're younger. Also I think I have the confidence now to tackle more serious topics."
Alliott famously wrote her first book beneath her desk while at work. Not surprisingly, she was fired from her job as an advertising copywriter. "My boss said he didn't think I had my mind on the job."
She went home and broke the news to her lawyer husband. "I told him the good news was I was writing a novel," she recalls. "He sort of groaned but was very supportive.
"And then shortly afterwards I discovered I was pregnant, so there didn't seem much point in going back to a proper job."
Trapped in the house with a sleeping baby, she used the spare time to type up the novel she'd written longhand while pregnant. "I hadn't thought of having it published but then my husband said I should have a go, so I sent it to a friend of a friend who knew an agent. It was all very tenuous."
Since then she's sold 1.4 million books and says writing is the thing that keeps her sane.
"I don't know if I could spend my time just playing tennis, having coffee and riding horses. I like the balance of stretching myself. And I enjoy putting on nice clothes and going to London to have lunch with my publishers. You feel you're still part of the real world.
"So as long as it's fun, I'll keep writing," she adds.
"And when it becomes a bore you'll find me in bed with a lime cream lolly."
