Developments...
Mistress of the Sea will be published by Ebury Press, with the release of the hardback scheduled for September 2012, and another novel to follow about the lost colony of Roanoke.
Mistress of the Sea has won three shortlistings, the most recent being for the Joan Hessayon Award under the New Writers' Scheme of the Romantic Novelists' Association
At the Festival of Romance
Moderating the Reader Awards at the inaugural Festival of Romance was a richly rewarding and eye-opening experience.
There's a blog post about it at If Shakespeare..., the Verulam Writers' Circle blog.
And at San Diego…
I took part in the Maritime History Panel at the fourth North American Historical Novel Society Conference held in June 2011.
The Conference was a wonderful gathering of almost 300 historical fiction writers of all kinds, including big-name authors such as Diana Gabaldon and CW Gortner, as well as editors, agents, and those behind the running of the HNS publications.
I'll be coordinating the 2012 Conference to be held over the weekend of 29/30 September 2012 at the University of Westminster, Regent Street, London. For details about that please visit the HNS website
Get Writing 2011 in pictures: the sheer utter joy of writing
For more information on the Get Writing conference, and the activities of my excellent writers' circle, please visit the VWC website.
The last Get Writing, held in association with the University of Hertfordshire, took place on 19 February 2011 to great acclaim.
The 2012 event will also take place at the University of Hertfordshire, on 11 Feb.
Mistress of the Sea won its second short-listing, it its working title To the Ends of the World, for the Short Story Radio First Chapter Competition 2010, adjudicated by author, Sophie King, on the basis of a working draft of the first chapter.
Short Story Radio is involved in many exciting initiatives including the upcoming National Short Story Week.
Love Writing
This wonderfully useful 'how to' book by Sue Moorcroft contains a wealth of good advice on the business of writing romantic fiction with a host of contributions from experts in the field - and there's even a little piece by me.
My involvement, in the section on promotion, arose through my work in co-ordinating the Verulam Writers' Circle Get Writing Conference for the second year running. The event has grown enormously since its inception four years ago, and now attracts writers from all over the country with speakers ranging from leading editors and literary agents to best-selling authors.
Love Writing is available through most bookstores and from Accent Press.
On February 10th 2009, a scene from an early draft of To the Ends of the World was shortlisted for the Willesden Herald International Short Story Competition, being one of ten selected from 645 entries.
The adjudicator who made the final selection for the shortlist, and who awarded the overall prize, was Rana Dasgupta, author of Tokyo Cancelled and Solo, which has won praise from Salman Rushdie as a 'novel of exceptional and astonishing strangeness'.
On 9 March, at the Costa Cafe in Piccadilly, a book compiled from the ten shortlisted stories was launched: The Willesden Herald New Short Stories 3.
The book is now available from Amazon, as well as direct from the publishers in the US, or through bookstores around the world.
