I could spend all day with you, and the moment that I left your presence, I would not be able to describe what you were wearing.

It’s not because I wasn’t paying attention to you! Chances are, it was because I was focusing on other parts of you: your face, your words, your laughter.

I am just not the sort of person who notices that sort of thing.

This doesn’t really bother me in my day to day life – to be honest, many of my friends and family wouldn’t actually know that about me. But when it comes to my writing, that is a real challenge.

One of my editors once pointed out that based on the amount of description that I gave my characters, most of them could be going through the entirety of my novel…without wearing anything 😅 I hadn’t mentioned a gown or a greatcoat, not once! It’s only when someone else points that out do you really start to notice, and I found it mortifying.

Of course, my characters are (mostly) wearing clothes – and of course, I have worked hard to learn how to write better descriptions of clothing into my books. But if I am being really open about this, it’s not my favourite thing to write. There’s always a little intricacy that I haven’t noticed or a mistake that I’ve made, it just doesn’t flow from my fingertips.

The more I read about Regency era clothing, the more engravings I look at and paintings I visit, the easier it is becoming…but I suppose in a way, it would be a lot easier if my characters joined a nudist colony…