RWNZ Conference 2008

I remembered to take photos! Hooray!

Sara Hantz, Amanda Ashby and me, three of the witches (although fourth witch Pat was with us in spirit!) This was taken on Friday during tea break. The Friday all day workshop with Margie Lawson was phenomenal. Margie used to teach psychology and communication courses at post-graduate level, and her workshop showed us how to add power to our words by using fresh writing to evoke an instinctive and emotional response in the reader. If you ever have the chance to attend one of Margie's workshops - do it!!!! I had so many lightbulb moments during her workshop I sizzled.

Here I am with Giovanna Lee and Sara, all glammed up for the Saturday night Awards Dinner. The theme was Moonlight and Midnight and although it doesn't show in the photo, we all had silver glitter in our hair!










Ellie Huse, NZ contest co ordinator extraordinare!











Friday Night Cocktails with Mills and Boon fab author, Susan Napier. Yes I am holding two glasses of wine and no, they are not both mine!!! (I apologise for not being chronological about this, but blogger is a bugger for posting photos)














Here I am hanging out with the lovely Nalini Singh at the Harlequin Cocktail bash. Just one glass of wine this time.













Here are the London Chickies!!! Talking to the gorgeous Rachel Collins was just like talking to my mates back in sunny Croydon!













This was after the Saturday Awards dinner. I think I might have been sliding off my chair by this time, but the lovely Barb Jeffcott Geris gamely kept me propped upright for the photo!!














Amanda, Sara, Margie Lawson and yours truly.













Three of the Meet the Editor finalists - Toni, me and Pam. Thank you Suzanne Perazzini for taking the photo!

Carolyn, Sandy and multi-pubbed author and editor at The Wild Rose Press (not my editor though!) Cheryl Wright. Aka The Aussie Quartet (minus one - I was taking the photo). We did grab hold of an innocent bystander to take another one of all of us together (and yes funny you should ask he did so happen to be young and male... and appeared a bit terrified as we yelled and beckoned him over!) But I decided to go for this one as I looked well past my sell by date in the other. This was Sunday night after the conference had finished, and almost everyone had gone home. We had dinner and a great chinwag. It was fantastic, and a brilliant way to end an amazing weekend.

I arrived home late Monday night, and didn't check my mail until Tuesday. And I have the most exciting news to share!!! And I'm going to share it tomorrow!!!

Countdown...Two Days

Only two days to go until I'm on my way to New Zealand! There's only one direct flight a day from WA to NZ which is the reason why I'm landing in Auckland at the ungodly hour of 5.45am Thursday morning. Urgh. I really hope the hotel has our room ready early for me, since all I'll want to do when I arrive is collapse!

Just to make things more interesting, daughter #2 was ill with tonsilitis last week. Being a good kind mama, I told her to keep away from me as I didn't want to catch her germs. heh heh. She retaliated by passing it onto her brother. So I now have my son off school with tonsilitis and another associated throat infection, both offspring on antibiotics and I, of course, feel like my eyes are filled with scratching insects and my head is throbbing. If that's not enough, eldest child is moving out tomorrow and is not best pleased that I won't be around for the rest of the week to help her move into her new place. Yes, it's all happening this week, and did I mention my husband decided to rip out the family bathroom? The house looks like a train wreck!!!

San Fran Updates

Unfortunately not from me... since I didn't go...! but if you want to see some pics then Sara Hantz, Nalini Singh and Shelley Munro have posted some great ones. Definitely looks like a great time was had by all!

My first round of edits are done and dusted, and my editor says she is looking forward to reading them! That gave me a bit of a thrill. I should really be getting on with something else but all I can think about is the NZ conference next week and meeting up with everyone again. I'm also wondering whether or not Customs will stop me again. I don't think I look especially suspicious, but apparently I do!!

Good News & Scarlet Rose Editors

There's been soooo much good news coming from San Fran over the weekend, it's making me more jealous than ever that I couldn't make it this year! First of all EC and Berkley author Denise Rossetti won the Passionate Plume Futuristic/Fantasy/SF award for Tailspin and the lovely Anna Campbell won Best long historical for the Booksellers Best Awards with her dark Regency Claiming the Courtesan. Aussie Catherine got The Call face to face from Kathleen Scheibling, editor of Harlequin American Romance, and then NZer Sandra received The Call at 7am in her hotel room from Melissa Jeglinski, editor of Silhouette Desire. I foresee much partying at the NZ conference in celebrations!!!

I also want to give a shout out to fellow Wild Rose Press author Maggie Toussaint. Her novel, House of Lies, won the Best Romantic Suspense for the Readers Choice Awards. She was in the most excellent company, and finalled alongside Roxanne St Claire. Well done Maggie!!!

For anyone interested in how editors' minds work, there's a great interview over at The Wild Rose Press with the Scarlet Rose editors from the erotic romance line. You can catch their words of wisdom here.

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!

The Wild Rose Press SONY eReader

I've not come to a standstill on my writing, but it's slowed down quite a bit this last week. It would be nice to say it's because I'm doing revisions but that would be a Big Fat Lie and very wrong of me. It's going to be tight to reach the 50k goal by 30th June but I haven't given up the race yet!!

I received the score sheets for the MTE contest and the encouraging comments from the judges were just amazing. It gave me added enthusiasm to dive back into the story and it's great to know complete strangers actually enjoyed my writing and wanted to read more!!

In other news, The Wild Rose Press are holding a drawing to win a SONY eReader, which looks rather fabulous. Full details are here.

Contests & Challenges

My little piece of good writing news from 18th June is that I'm one of the finalists in the Romance Writers of New Zealand's Meet the Editor contest. This is the contest I had such fun with a few weeks ago trying to figure out the formatting! I'm pretty excited by finalling as it means my pages are winging their way to Cindy Hwang, executive editor at Berkley Publishing, for her comments. The finalists also get the chance to chat to Cindy at the NZ conference about their pages. Doubly exciting!!

This means that I've gone back to that story, which I left at the end of May a quarter written. I did originally mean to tackle it for my June Challenge, but became sidetracked with a contemp romance (and I'm not complaining because that dead body had been haunting me since last October. Am very glad to have sorted that problem out!!)

So adding together the words I managed on the contemp romance, the second short erotic paranormal I wrote last week and the new chapter I've written on the paranormal I entered into the contest, I'm just about still on track to get my 50k in 30 days. If I manage that, it will be the most I've written in one month for ages. Hooray!

18th June 2008

Today has been a Very Good Day!!!

First of all, it's my 25th wedding anniversary. Aside from the fact it's impossible I've been married for 25 years (seeing how I am only 29!) I can't believe it was a quarter of a century ago we actually got married! Doesn't time fly when you're having fun!

Then I received some very exciting writing related news which was a lovely pressie to wake up to today of all days (more about that later!) and then this evening TWRP uploaded my author page on their site! Check it out here!

Challenge & Website Update

After the excitement of the last week, I got a bit behind in my 50k challenge. On Thursday I decided to put aside the novel I'd been working on, and started a new paranormal erotic romance (thank you, Meat Loaf!!!) Yes, I'd once again been listening to Bat Out of Hell while burning the dinner. It's coming along nicely although I haven't quite worked out how the hero and heroine will end up together. Unless I kill them off. Now there's a thought!

My husband has always been very supportive of my writing, but on Saturday his support took on a whole new level. Before leaving for work he told our son he was not to watch tv in the theatre room today because Mum was working (my desk is in the corner of that room). It was a little thing, and yet huge. Just to be on the safe side I barricaded myself into my corner by angling the sofa so no one (iow my son) could creep up behind me and lurk over my shoulder. I still haven't quite recovered from the time he was in Year 3 and told his teacher and the entire class that his mum spent all day on the computer writing sex.

I've also updated my website. Yet again! The lovely Rach suggested I post my sale story, so that's up there now under Articles.

Thank You!!

Thank you to everyone who sent congratulations and good wishes on my blog and privately on my sale to The Wild Rose Press! I've been getting quite tearful over the last couple of days!

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And I got all tearful again today, when the lovely witches sent me these beautiful flowers. Aren't they gorgeous? As if that wasn't enough they even specifically asked for irises (the irises are all in bud at the moment so I'm looking forward to them blooming tomorrow!

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Because my editor uses track changes, and I've never got around to using them (and you can bet I now regret laughing at Sara four years ago when she tried to educate me in that direction!!) I've been taking a crash course. The online tutorial was in double dutch, but thankfully the ever patient Sara and Shelley (who both deserve medals of endurance) have come to my rescue. It's actually quite a cool function once I got past the freak factor!
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My eldest daughter told her friends I had sold, and apparently they are in mild shock that Mrs Phillips *could* write such things. *cough* My brother, bless him, asked if it was autobiographical.
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He was joking. I think.

SOLD!!!

MySpace Glitters

Yes, it's finally happened!!! Today I sold a paranormal erotic romance to The Wild Rose Press and I am so excited I can hardly sit still!

The email arrived this morning (on a Sunday!!) and after I recovered from a mild panic attack I bravely opened it up. To a contract!!! And to My Editor (omg I can hardly believe I have an editor!) saying lovely things about my story!!! She called it 'an interesting blend of smoky eroticism and a dramatic look into the dark world of vampires and witchcraft.' Squeeee!!!!!

Thankfully I managed to flush out the witches so we could all squeee together because it's much more fun that way!!

So now I'm waiting for edits! OMG!

Update

The first week of the challenge is going well and I've managed to clock up over 15,000 words. This puts me ahead of myself which is just as well as I never seem to get much writing done on Sundays.

Did you notice I was very clever and put the 50k in 30 days widget on my blog! Thanks to Sandie who created it (I have no idea how these things work, I just copy the coding!!)

And We're Off

Usually I don't manage to write a word on Sundays, seeing as it tends to be the only day my husband has off and I always do a full Sunday roast no matter what the weather. But yesterday I was very good and did 2410 words. I think they might even be quite passable words too!

We have word meters up on the Challenge blog and it does look good to see them slowly move upwards. Today, I fully intended to try for another thousand, despite the huge turkey I had to prepare for dinner, but things didn't quite go to plan.

My son had his friend round, and while I can just about tune out the sound of the tv in the background, combined with two thirteen year old boys laughing and carrying on about two feet behind my chair was pushing my powers of concentration too far. I got 771 words down and gave it up as a lost cause.

But I'm still pretty happy with the total so far so, and am even happier with the fact I had two fulls requested from two different publishers on Saturday!