New release – now available for pre-order

When a book comes out it makes all the years of hard work – and yes, sometimes it can takes years! – worthwhile. In about a second of seeing the front cover (such a brilliant moment), all that fades away and you’re left with a beautiful thing that’s testament, certainly not just to your own work, but to everyone else’s too – the publishing team, editor, proofreader and, of course, friends who helped and supported you along the way.

Until I had a book published, I must confess to having no idea about the amount of time and knowledge that went into it from everyone involved. Now I know, it makes me so grateful to everyone who made it possible.

With Little Village of Second Chances – my new book, which is available now for pre order – I got an opportunity for the first time to write an acknowledgements page. I’ve dedicated each of my past books to someone special, which is great, but it can be difficult choosing one when so many deserve a mention. That’s why it was so nice to write the acknowledgements page this time – to say thank you to everyone. My palms are slightly sweaty now as I hope I didn’t forget anyone.

That’s the acknowledgements, but what about the book? Probably the best way to give you a flavour is to share the blurb. Here it is:

Surely everyone deserves a second chance?

Ex-fireman and edible flower farmer Shay McGillen has plenty of reasons not to give Sarah Pickering even one chance when she turns up in his small Yorkshire village. After all, she is only there to try and convince him and his fellow villagers to sell up so her company can build a bypass. If Sarah thinks she can make Shay give up his farmhouse and his business, she has another thing coming!

But when an unexpected blizzard leaves Sarah stranded in Shay’s home, he soon realises that they are far more alike than he could have ever imagined – and perhaps both of them deserve a second chance …

If you like the sound of Village of Second Chances and want to read the full story, you can pre-order through Amazon here: https://smarturl.it/9wvutt

Very exciting announcement

I’m truly delighted to announce that I’ll be writing three novels for fiction publisher, Choc Lit.

The first, The Village of Second Chances, will be out in summer 2020 and is set in and near York – close to where I grew up. Although I live a long way from York these days, I took a trip back there a few weeks ago and took a few snaps of the places I remember that inspired the story.

I can’t wait for the first book’s release, and to start penning the second!

Available now for pre-order

I’m very happy to announce The Virgin’s Gamble is available now on Amazon for pre-order in print and on Kindle.

A huge thank you to The Wild Rose Press, especially Roseann for her amazing patience and unbelievable editing skills, and Diana, who did the gorgeous cover!

New book cover revealed!

It was with some trepidation that I awaited the reveal of my debut novel’s cover.  Cover art is everything.  What if I didn’t like it?  What if it didn’t represent my story or characters well?

There is nothing quite as exciting as seeing your book cover for the first time.  Getting the contract is exciting in itself, learning how the editing process works is an education and seeing your work laid out in a real book format is awesome, but getting that front cover art – that is something different entirely!

I’d been waiting for months to see the front cover, and when the email with it attached finally came through, I held my breath.  I needn’t have worried – I absolutely loved it!

Gorgeous man, sexy woman, fabulous colours and fonts.  I loved everything about it.  And now I can share it.  Hurrah!

The next thing to look forward to is holding a copy in my hands.  Can’t wait!

Judging a Book without a Cover

Having recently become a member of the Romance Writers of Australia I decided to make the most of my membership.  What a very frightening proposition this was to be as I decided to not only enter one of the competitions, but volunteer to be a judge on another.

So I merrily clicked ‘send’ on my entry to ‘Roaring Start’, and all that’s left to do on that one is keep my fingers crossed.  I believe it will be quite a few months before I hear anything so plenty of time to accrue some rejections from elsewhere in the process (teehee).

Far scarier than that, however, was putting myself forward to be a judge on another competition.  You’d think that would be easy, but for good reason it isn’t.  When you’re dealing with critiquing other people’s work you of course have to be constructive yet sensitive, which is much more difficult that it sounds.

I know all too well how horrendous it is to hear that your work doesn’t quite tick all the right boxes so in many ways I think I’m perfectly placed to deliver any sort of feedback.  However, a counter argument would be – who am I to judge when I haven’t actually managed to get anything published myself?!  Hmm, good question…

I of course have an opinion as valid as anyone else’s when it comes to being a reader, so hopefully that goes some way to answering the question.  From a personal point of view I hope that in being a judge will make me a better writer myself, as I see the positives and negatives in other people’s writing and in turn recognise the good points / faults in my own work.

I’ve discovered that been a volunteer judge is very time consuming – and comes with a strong sense of responsibility!  I’ve now read all the judges’ training material, been through several past judging sheets and done my own trial judging session.  I’m just waiting now to find out if I’ve ‘passed’.

Yet another step on this challenging journey of becoming an author – what if I don’t even get accepted as a volunteer judge, I’ve asked myself.  That really would be one knock back too far!  Probably.  Maybe not actually.  The road to being a writer may be thankless up until the point that your manuscript finally gets accepted, but it’s one hell of a lesson in how to develop the skin of a rhino!