The perils of speech to text software (you won't find this in a manual)

What could be more embarrassing than leaving your underwear in the middle of the floor for your father in law to trip over?

Er, how about dictating a steamy sex scene using your voice software only for a deep male voice to call "Hi there" through the window, it was the gardener come to cut the grass.

Really, I am never coming out of my house again... Or having visitors, or...

And for those of you who were wondering (and I know who you are!) yes, the gardener is nice! And yes the underwear thing did happen to me.

What happens in Vegas

I was feeling depressed after watching 'Paris Hilton's New best Friend'. I know, I have only myself to blame!

Anyway, in need of cheering up I put 'What Happens in Vegas' into the DVD player. Ashton Kutcher certainly cheered me up although the film annoyed me in places and I hit the fast forward button a lot. That said there were some great sexy moments and some good writing.

Ashton "I bet you'd look really good with your hair down."
Cameron Diaz "My hair is down."

Despite still not having recovered from the conference I have managed to work on the rest of my partial on paper, and have a dirty draft. Actually it is very dirty - my characters decided to have sex much earlier than I'd planned to let them so I may have to go back over it and spoil their fun ;-)

Gaffs, gossip and good news...

I've finally emerged from my post conference 'hangover' to make it to blogland. The effort of the weekend, despite all my efforts at pacing, has taken its toll and I've been asleep for practically the entire time since I got back on Sunday!

Anyway, it was worth it and great fun to meet fellow Minxes, blog friends and some truly lovely authors (not to mention editors!).

(The photo on the left is me melting in the heat at the Gala dinner next to Lucy King.)

Gaffs - Unsurprisingly I disregarded my "What not to do at your first conference" advice. This year I graduated from knocking cups of water over people's feet and threw pills at them too! My capacity to talk drivel also got an airing and topics of conversation with eminent Mills and Boon authors with 5o books under their belts ranged from the complexity of showers to the heaviness of doors. I topped that by discussing toilet roll with a nice lady who turned out to be Joanna Trollope!

Really I shouldn't be allowed out ;-)

Gossip - It was good to get the low down on the new Riva line and very exciting to hear about the changes to the covers and titles of the Modern Heat books. The key phrases from the Mills and Boon talk seemed to be 'twenty first century' and for wannabe authors - 'innovate, don't imitate'. Overall the feedback from publishers was positive with talk of sales booming and ebooks forming a large part of the future. 150,000 Mills and Boon ebooks were downloaded in 2009 and there are rumours that Google will be selling ebooks in the near future.

David Shelley from Little, Brown told us that in his opinion Romantic fiction is bigger now than in any time in the past two decades...

Good News - My Mills and Boon editor slot went well. In fact it went so well I'm convinced I dreamed it or somehow have blanked the parts where they trashed the submitted chapter! But for the moment I'm going with the dream where they loved the chapter and have asked for the next two chapters, said they're looking forward to working with me...

Before I drift off into my dream world that skips the hard graft of writing the rest of the story I want to let you know that Lucy King will be answering questions for the the Minxes tomorrow (Wednesday) and Julie Cohen has graciously offered to write a post for us about the conference to appear on the Minx blog on Friday. I leave you with some more photos from the conference - the lovely Nina Harrington and Natalie Rivers, the three conference Minxes and my two charming gala dinner companions Mary Nichols and Margaret Baker.