Scarlet Roses

It's Hot in August in the Garden.

If you love Erotic Romance, join the authors of the Wilder Roses for

31 Sultry Scarlet Nights!

31 days of scorching hot downloads from Scarlet Rose - the erotic romance line of
The Wild Rose Press.

Each day stop by the Wilder Roses blog and post a comment on the day's topic. A winner will be drawn each night to receive a digital title from the Scarlet Rose catalog.

For a second chance to win, stop by

The Wilder Roses Yahoo loop.

Each night a winner will be drawn from those who posted during the day.

There will also be a grand prize at the end of the month. For everyone who participated throughout the month, you will be entered into a drawing for a Frederick's of Hollywood Gift Certificate! It's easy to enter for the daily give-a-ways and the grand prize. Your participation will automatically enter you.



http://www.thewilderroses.com/

Conferences & Email or lack thereof

So the San Fran conference is upon us which means nearly everyone I know has flown off to the US!! Lucky things. I'm looking forward to detailed reports and lots of photos next week.

And my email isn't working. The internet is, but not my email. I kept hitting Send/Receive in the hope I might trick it and the server would magically let my emails through, but nope. I hate not getting my emails, I feel very isolated. And besides, I might have a Very Important Email out there in cyberspace, just sort of floating around and it makes me twitchy. I tried fiddling with all the connections and rebooting the computer but obviously it needs a sniff of a Y chromosone before complying. Blahhhhhh.

The NZ conference is in two and a half weeks and I've already started packing. Well sort of. Just getting the toiletry bits and pieces together. I have a paranoid fear of forgetting something desperately important (such as shampoo because, after all, it's impossible to buy shampoo in NZ... er, yeah...) well anyway. I find it exciting seeing my hot purple luggage out, and since it's out I might as well start to fill it!!

Revisions!

I got my revisions for Foretaste of Forever today and couldn't wait to dive in (after I'd had a bit of a squee with the witches of course!) My editor had a few questions about various aspects and I've really enjoyed delving deeper into my characters world. She also had a great suggestion for the beginning and I can't wait to get stuck into that, although it will probably have to wait until Monday when I'm alone in the house (more steamy sex is required and my son has this scary tendancy to creep up behind me when I'm on the computer - not something I want him doing when I'm trying to write hot!)

Author Promotion

If you are an author looking for ways to promote your book, then rush over to Shelley's blog, where she has the amazing Marcia James offering all kinds of fabulous advice for writers at all stages of their career. In her previous life Marcia had a career in marketing and advertising and loves PR almost as much as writing her 'hot humorous romances' for Cerridwen Press.

But that's not all! Marcia is also generously giving away her 150+ page file of author promotion information to any author who requests it. Hop over to read all the details!

Foretaste of Forever Blurb

It occurred to me that I hadn't posted a blurb of Foretaste of Forever anywhere - oops! So I've added it to the sidebar.

I'm still struggling with the wip, although I have no idea why since I love this one so much. It just seems the words don't love me quite so much as I'm having a hell of time getting them down on the screen!

The Big Read

Saw this listing on Amanda's blog so decided to do mine here!

The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. How do you do?

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

I just bolded the ones I've read, mainly because when I copied and pasted the list instead of it being all nice and neat it turned into one huge nightmare paragraph that I had to defrag... so I can't be bothered with underlining and italicising!!!

1 Pride and Prejudice
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 - I don't know what happened to #51
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Pages, Chocolate and Links

And whoops! There goes another week!

Because I slacked off badly the week after the last challenge, I went and signed up for a new one on Monday. This is run by the same ladies who organised the 50k in 30 Days Challenge and my personal goal is to write four new pages each day. Very doable. So long as I, you know, actually do it! And I need to if I want to get this book finished before the New Zealand conference - I fly five weeks today! Squee!!!

And now for some randomness. Shelley had the most fantastico ad on her blog the other day. It was advertising chocolate (I remember that only because it was chocolate!!) but really it didn't matter in the least what it was trying to sell, since the ad itself is priceless. Doesn't hurt that the music is classic Phil Collins either!!! I keep hopping over to watch it here.

And also Patwitch has finally succumbed to the Dark Side and taken up blogging!

Countdown Complete

Where did June go? Did I fall into a coma half way through and not realise??

I can't believe another month has flashed by. This is getting seriously scary!! Just as scary is the fact I didn't quite manage to complete my 50ks in 30 Days. At the half way point I'd reached just over the 25k mark, so I was on track. But the final week conspired against me (and here I'm going to rack my brains to think of every excuse possible. Ha!) Okay I won't use excuses. I didn't cross the finish line but having said that, I'm very happy with what I achieved last month.

Not only did I crack the dead body story (maybe I should retitle that one The Dead Body That Never Was), I also wrote a second erotic romance (thank you Meat Loaf), and last week dived back into my paranormal. Not only that, but for a couple of nights during the final week I was writing my para during the day and my contemp at night - a first for me but I'm trying to make some good habits!

So a big Thank You to the lovely ladies who organised the challenge, and kept the blog and loop hopping. I wrote a lot more this month than I have for ages - 43,397 words.

I also want to send out a huge *~*~CONGRATULATIONS~*~* to all the girls who reached their own personal goals for the month of June, and those who hit the 50k. There were also several who wrote waaaay more than 50k and I have to give a special mention to RC who managed to hit 100k with about half an hour to go!