Spring fever

US & Canada cover

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Yesterday Minty showed up on the M&B and Harlequin sites as available to pre-order. You may think this isn't quite so momentous an occasion second time round but you would be totally wrong: The Book of a Thousand Rewrites, The Book with Many Sacrificed Secondary Characters, The Book with Six Different First Chapters and The Book in Which I Slaughtered My Darlings has made it! Minty - and lovely Luca of course - are all grown up and ready to face the world on their own just as Lawrie and Jonas have done *wipes away tears*.

Luckily I have been far too busy to spend my time obsessively checking Amazon rankings and Goodreads reviews (note, this may not be strictly true). Final edits and copy edits are in for book 3, now formally known as His Reluctant Cinderella and it will be out in October, I am working on book 4 which is linked to book 3 (heroine, Polly, is twin sister to His Reluctant Cinderella's hero, Raff. This is new for me and it's great fun to expand a setting through more than one book), and I am planning for a super sekrit project so it is all a teeny bit hectic.

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It's not all been chained-to-a-keyboard (or feeling guilty about not being chained) though. Last weekend I travelled down to the very pretty town of Chipping Norton to take part in their fabulous literary festival and gave a talk on writing Mills & Boon to a wonderful group who laughed in all the right places and asked loads of questions. The talk was followed by a literary quiz which we mistakenly thought we might win but sadly other teams were better - the Cheerleaders of Doom (myself, lovely editor Flo, fellow M&B writer India Grey and gorgeous twitter writer friends Amanda Jennings, Rachael Lucas and Claire Dyer) had to settle for respectable mid table mediocrity.

And finally I have been nominated for an award! On May 22nd the RNA will be holding their Summer Party and announcing the winner of the Joan Hessayon  award. This is a prize for new novelists and this year there are a stonking seventeen of us so I am busy practicing my Leonardo DiCaprio at the Oscars face. I haven't read all seventeen books but nominees include my amazing crit partner Jane O'Reilly and first RNA conference flatmate Alison May. I have read and loved both their nominated books so the standard is scarily high. Good luck to all my fellow contenders and see you there.