Flibbertigibbet

Last week I managed to visit Montreux, Northern Italy, Monaco and then Cannes all in one day. Such gallivanting is most unusual, normally the highlight of my week is a trip to the supermarket but I was piggybacking on a business trip for which my ice cream eating presence was clearly essential, Mr Taxman :-)

While away I've been working on the partial of 'The Art of Seduction' and am hopefully getting close to submitting. But my flibbertigibbety behaviour has taken it's predictable toll on my health and so it may be 'The Art of Seduction - the Zombie Version' that goes to Richmond!

The accompanying sensation of an icepick wedged inside my brain has weirdly given me the opening to my new story idea, weird because you'd think the luxurious towns would have been the obvious inspiration. Although I did pass a gorgeous town in Italy that I instantly knew would be my setting - San Lorenzo al Mer (see below).

I'm not sure whether to give into competition fever - I need to concentrate on finishing AOS and have a punishing round of rehabilitation appointments and a medication change coming up. I should be sensible.

Maybe I'll just write that first chapter...

I have other distractions too - my ipad has just arrived, Hooray :-)

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.

A stranger in a foreign land...

I've just pressed send on the chapter being subbed for my M&B editor slot at the conference. I haven't been to NTAI (not thinking about it) country for a good while and to be honest the journey has been so knackering I am genuinely not NTAI. Having already been welcomed by a friendly fellow resident (waves to Jackie) I'm ready for a hot bath and bed.
I've weeded enough 'felt's out of my chapter to make several cuddly toys and have spent more time on a one page synopsis than a sane person ever should (Hmm, is that why I'm mad I wonder? All those one pagers?)
I love the story but battling errant 'voice to text' software, acquired dyslexia and a permanent headache to get it into some sort of reasonable format has been exhausting.
I still want to do it, I can't not do it so I have to find some way of making it work, even though it's so much harder. It reminds me of toothache - when it strikes it makes you wonder why you didn't value that great long period of time when your teeth weren't hurting.

If you're still pulling teeth, sorry I meant writing your synopsis, here's a good tip I received recently - remember it should be selling your story to the appropriate line. I got so fixated on making my plot fit to one page I forgot to use it as a selling tool.

Oh and here's the editing checklist I use:

1. Check for clichés

2. Check the following and replace if possible: was, felt, just, that, actually, began to, started, he/she felt, though, observed.

3. Reduce adverbs

4. Cut any pairs of adjectives

5. Check for repetitions, choose the best and lose the rest

6. Don’t show AND tell

7. Cut unnecessary repetition of tense – I’d, she’d…

8. Look for repeated words and use thesaurus

9. Make characters take note of surroundings, create a sense of place

10. Use all the senses

11. Eat chocolate :-)

Has anyone else got any suggestions to add to my checklist?

The weird and the wired

I've been getting seriously hyped up about the upcoming RNA conference. What better way to gear up than attending last week's talk on Writing Romantic Fiction at Reading library? The meeting got off to a weird start for me as I thought I'd lost my marbles when the nice woman sitting next to me introduced herself as Romy from South Africa. Now I have bad memory problems so my first thought was to panic - was this my fellow Minx Romy who I'd believed to be still in South Africa? Actually it was another Romy but I had a very confused moment and as both are attending the conference I shall have to try not to get mixed up :-)
It was also strange when a couple of people mentioned having heard of the Minxes blog. Not to mention difficult to say "Actually I'm a Minx" without giving into the urge to giggle uncontrollably ;-)

Other than cringing on behalf of the panel when they were asked what the formula for writing Mills and Boon was (!) the point that struck me most from the talk was the panel's answer to the question 'How many full length novels did you complete before you were published?' The answer was anything between 2 and 10, the average being 5!
it reminded me again just how dedicated you have to be and how our commitment as writers is to the craft itself, rather than to any particular story.

Having said that I am loving diving into the world of the story I'll be pitching at the conference. For a taster below is the rooftop in Marrakech that my hero is going to whisk my heroine off to

It's good to talk...

The Minxes have been brainstorming on Skype recently and it's been great - instant input and discussion (and a real laugh to boot). I'm starting to think about the new story I'll hopefully be

pitching at the RNA conference and knowing I'll be under skype scrutiny at the end of the week means I'll get my act together this week.

It's also good to listen

Reading Library has an event on tomorrow evening (2nd June) - "Writing Romantic Fiction". Julie Cohen, Nina Harrington, Tania Crosse, Beth Elliott and Janet Gover will be talking and I'll hopefully be in the audience listening. There are even rumours of a Mills and Boon giveaway at the event.

I had a sneak peek at the ipad yesterday, I'll hopefully be getting one soon and am delighted to hear Mills and Boon books will be available on the ipad later in the year - I used the voice utility to play part of a book aloud in a shop and was really pleased to hear a natural sounding reading voice, not the robotic voice I currently get on my computer. It will transform things for me, I'll no longer be stuck with just what I can get on audiobook.

Although that said there is even good news on the audiobook front. I'm trying out a romance audiobooks website, audiolark, which has some very reasonably priced titles.

I'll be listening to Nell Dixon's 'The Cinderella Substitute' as my next book which I'm really pleased about, having met her at last year's RNA conference. Talking of which I'm getting ridiculously excited about this year's conference and being able to chat to some of the writing friends I've grown close to over the past two

years :-)

Yep, Bob Hoskins knew what he was on about (famous BT ad in the 90s, for those of you outside of the UK!) .