After dealing with a flooded garage at home due to heavy rain here on the south coast of NSW, I’m finally taking off the gumboots (or galoshes, or rain boots…whatever you like to call them!) to do a quick post about my weekend visit to Sydney! 😉

On Friday I visited the place where all the bookish magic happens – the Harlequin Australia headquarters in North Sydney. They have really nice, red light-shades hanging from the ceiling there. Just sayin’. 😉 Of course, I wasn’t there to inspect their decor (though, as I studied interior decorating in a past life I do tend to notice these things!). I was there to meet with my publishers and discuss present and future books. How exciting! My first visit to a publishing house. 🙂

Escape Publishing is the digital arm of Harlequin Australia and have published my first five books (which you can see here). It was great to meet some of the staff I hadn’t yet met, and chat about marketing and promotional strategies, book titles and plots, the often back-and-forth process of designing the perfect cover, and also some new and exciting things happening later this year which I’ll reveal when I’m allowed! I’m grateful to be with such an innovative and supportive publisher.

On Saturday I attended the Australian Romance Readers Association (ARRA) awards dinner. Two years ago I attended the awards dinner as an aspiring author; a little starstruck around these wonderful established authors who were winning awards, and this year I was there as not only an a published author but a finalist in the Favourite New Author category! Though I didn’t win (congrats to Anna Cowan!), I was thrilled to be nominated and I’d like to thank everyone who voted for me. 🙂 You can see the full list of award winners in the different categories HERE. Congrats to everyone! I love seeing fellow writers achieve milestones like this. And thanks to ARRA for putting on a great night and coordinating these awards. if you’re not yet a member, what are you waiting for? It’s not expensive and there are great perks. All the info on joining is HERE.

So it was a weekend of books, bling, and buddies. Books to write and publish, bling at the awards dinner (including a bling-off contest for the person with the best bling), and catching up with writing buddies and meeting new ones. I would add ‘yummy food’ to the mix but it doesn’t start with B. But there was yummy food involved too. 😉

2014 is shaping up to be a great year… so far I’ve had two back-to-back releases to kickstart my new Tarrin’s Bay series of coastal romance/women’s fiction novels; THE JANUARY WISH and FEBRUARY OR FOREVER. I’ve completed a new romagic comedy manuscript (HAUNTED EVER AFTER) and handed it in to my publisher, and was thrilled to have seen my first book FAST FORWARD make the Top 100 on Amazon recently. What’s next? Soon I’ll be starting to write a Christmas novella, and then I’ll move on to writing the third book in my TB series, MIRACLE IN MARCH (tentative title!). I’m looking forward to both, and looking forward to the rest of the year. I LOVE my writing life! Housework and cleaning up flooded garages…not so much 😉

Now, where did I put those gumboots?…