Hi Bernard, I’m a tremendous fan of your work, and have read all your Sharpe series, and your stand-alone thrillers. I particularly like the thrillers and the way you handle first-person. I hope you will be willing to help clear up a point of confusion for me about an item on your website. In your ‘tips for writing’ section you mention the blueprint concept of basing a novel’s structure on the structure of a book that is already successful. Absolutely brilliant idea! But I can’t quite understand the detail of how your charts worked. I’m desperate to try the concept myself, but I’d like to do it right. Could you expand the explanation of what you did for me… please! eg Do I find a book (say a chase adventure) and reproduce each paragraph of the novel and then overlay my own story and simply re-write the selected paragraph? eg In the novel it’s a chase through snow, so I write a similar scene as a chase through the jungle etc???I’m not sure where the colour-coding comes in etc etc. Bernard, it would be a tremendous aid to me if you could explain the concept in more detail. Oh, and does the idea work for first-person? eg an Alistair Maclean novel for example; the detective first-person kind of story, or is that type of book too complex and ‘individual’ to apply the blueprint method? Is it better for adventure novels etc. Shit, now I’m rambling! Sorry, mate. but I could do with a hand. Tony Moffitt, Australia