I have been working on my third novel in the Harriet series, Harriet and the Secret Coins, for close to 2 years. The storyline involves Harriet and her best friend Will going on a school excursion, visiting three historical Australian goldrush locations, and time-slipping back to those places with adventures, via the means of an old red phone box. This next novel is a real adventure involving three dragons (two good and one evil), crooked fake police, the eternal class intimidator and unfair teachers. The story is in three parts, and each part is fiction based on historical fact. I have loved doing the research and visiting each location for that research.Along the way, Harriet finds gold sovereign coins and eventually a nugget. My original plan was to have them visit Lambing Flat (Young, NSW), Hill End NSW and Ballarat, Victoria. After visiting the Temora rural museum last year, I changed the second location to Temora. In October 2018, my husband and I visited both Ballarat and Bendigo, where we stopped at the Central Deborah Gold Mine. Fascinating, and the legend about how the mine got its name is too good not to use, so I changed the location of the school visit to Bendigo. While there we saw a replica of a giant gold nugget which had been found by a man using a metal detector in 1980. Now, my original story outline has always been to have Harriet discover a gold nugget to help her family, as her mother has lost her job and her step-dad doesn't earn much. Harriet is 11. After I had written some more to the next chapter involving crooked fake police who confiscate the coins, a newspaper story popped up on Google when I logged on to search for something. There was a story of a young girl finding a gold nugget in Bendigo on Mother’s Day 2019. She kicked what she thought was a rock and then asked her father if it was gold. It turned out to be a gold nugget worth $35,000. Truth stranger than fiction? Or is it an affirmation that I'm on the right track? And even stranger......just as I finished reading the story, I received an email from an online booking company to tell me that Bendigo has some great last-minute deals!I am also super-excited and planning ahead to my next book launch, hopefully in late August. (Provided I finish the novel first!) Recently as I drove down our main street, I spotted a tall model red phone box in the window of a second-hand store. Perfect for my book launch, I thought. The store was closed but I rang the owner who was away, and he put it aside for me. It’s actually a CD rack, with wooden shelves, absolutely perfect for stacking the books in. Along with my dragon character Gruffyd’s large promotional head, I’m planning a whiz-bang launch (I hope!) Stay tuned!