April Fool's Day Freebie!

Sunday is April Fool's Day and, like a fool, I'm offering the Beaumont Brides Collection free all day on Kindle, so go fill your boots, tell your friends, tell everyone!

Should mention that this is 1st April US west coast time so there will be a time lag if you're anywhere east of that!

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION…

I don’t write fantasy, or SF, so my world building does not involve strange worlds, or new life forms, but nevertheless a lot of my books are set in a world of my own imagining.

It’s an English county, a little bit like Gloucestershire. At its heart is the city of Melchester — which made it’s first appearance in my second book, A Point of Pride — that has grown up along the River May, once a major river port. All those old warehouses are now desirable waterside apartments.

There’s the thriving market town of Maybridge — first appearance, A Stranger’s Kiss — upstream from Melchester. It was once the centre of an agricultural community, but has grown by leaps and bounds over the years and now has a business park and lively arts scene. There is talk of a Literary Festival…

Scattered around the county are the small villages, Upper and Lower Haughton, Longbourne, Little Hinton.

I know these places. I may have created the names, moulded them to my own needs, imagined local shops, garages, pubs, but I grew up in a town very like Maybridge. I spent sunny Sunday afternoons watching cricket in the village that I call Upper Haughton. I have a Stanley Spencer painting of Cookham Moor —the Common in Longbourne in my world — as the wallpaper on my work computer. (My Dad actually saw Sir Stanley Spencer painting in Cookham churchyard when he was a lad.

The fact that I can feel these places, know the sound of my footsteps as I cross the little wooden bridge to the island in the River May (Ray Mill Island on the Thames), can see the weeping willows trailing in the river, the aviary, meant that writing The Last Woman He’d Ever Date was like taking a walk through a precious memory. And I can’t remember how many times I took a short-cut on my bike down a footpath…

   Claire Thackeray swung her bike off the road and onto the footpath that crossed Cranbrook Park estate.
   The “No Cycling” sign had been knocked down by the quad bikers before Christmas and late for work, again, she didn’t bother to dismount.
She wasn’t a rule breaker by inclination but no one was taking their job for granted at the moment, besides, hardly anyone used the path.      The Hall was unoccupied but for a caretaker and any fisherman taking advantage of the hiatus in occupancy to tempt Sir Robert’s trout from the Cran wouldn’t give two hoots. Which left only Archie and he’d look the other way for a bribe.
   As she approached a bend in the path Archie, who objected to anyone travelling faster than walking pace past his meadow, charged the hedge. It was terrifying if you weren’t expecting it — hence the avoidance by joggers — and pretty unnerving if you were. The trick was to have a treat ready and she reached in her basket for the apple she carried to keep him sweet.
Her hand met fresh air and as she looked down she had a mental image of the apple sitting on the kitchen table, before Archie — not a donkey to be denied an anticipated treat — brayed his disapproval.

   Her first mistake was not to stop and dismount the minute she realised she had no means of distracting him, but while his first charge had been a challenge, his second was the real deal. While she was still on the what, where, how, he leapt through one of the many gaps in the long neglected hedge, easily clearing the sagging wire and she was too busy pumping the pedals in an attempt to outrun him to be thinking clearly.
   Her second mistake was to glance back, see how far away he was and the next thing she knew she’d come to an abrupt and painful halt in a tangle of bike and limbs — not all of them her own — and was face down in a patch of bluebells growing beneath the hedge.
   Archie stopped, snorted, then, job done, he turned around and trotted back to his hiding place to await his next victim. Unfortunately the man she’d crashed into, and who was now the bottom half of a bicycle sandwich, was going nowhere.
   ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he demanded.
   ‘Smelling the bluebells,’ she muttered, keeping very still while she mentally checked out the “ouch” messages filtering through to her brain.
   There were quite a lot of them and it took her a while, but even so she would almost certainly have moved her hand, which appeared to be jammed in some part of the man’s anatomy if it hadn’t been trapped beneath the bike’s handlebars. Presumably he was doing the same since he hadn’t moved, either. ‘Such a gorgeous scent, don’t you think?’ she prompted, torn between wishing him to the devil and hoping that he hadn’t lost consciousness.
   His response was vigorous enough to suggest that while he might have had a humour bypass — and honestly if you didn’t laugh, well, with the sort of morning she’d had, you’d have to cry — he was in one piece.
   Ignoring her attempt to make light of the situation he added, ‘This is a footpath.’
‘So it is,’ she muttered, telling herself that he wouldn’t have been making petty complaints about her disregard for the bye-laws if he’d been seriously hurt. It wasn’t a comfort. ‘I’m so sorry I ran into you.’ And she was. Really, really sorry.
   Sorry that her broad beans had been attacked by blackfly. Sorry that she’d forgotten Archie’s apple. Sorry that Mr Grumpy had been standing in her way.

   Until thirty seconds ago she had merely been late. Now she’d have to go home and clean up. Worse, she’d have to ring in and tell the news editor she’d had an accident which meant he’d send someone else to keep her appointment with the chairman of the Planning Committee.
   He was going to be furious. She’d lived on Cranbrook Park all her life and she’d been assigned to cover the story.
  ‘It’s bad enough that you were using it as a race track—’
  Oh, great. There you were lying in a ditch, entangled in bent bicycle, with a strange man’s hand on your backside — he’d better be trapped too — and his first thought was to lecture her on road safety.


The Last Woman He'd Ever Date will be published in July in the US and dates to be announced in the UK and Australia, but you can pre-order on Amazon now.

Six Sentence Sunday...

This week on Six Sentence Sunday I'm celebrating the release of my Beaumont Brides trilogy in a single volume - The Beaumont Brides Collection! - on Kindle to both buy or borrow.

It was hard to choose which book to take the big six from, but here goes! This is from Wild Fire -

   'Are you quite sure you're prepared to take the risk? Once you've heard the mermaid singing -'  Softly, she began to sing an old folk song from the Auvergne; the strange acoustics of the caves picking up the lilting melody lent it an awesome mystery and as Jack stared at her mesmerised by the sudden realisation of what she was going to do, Mel reached up and pulled at the bow fastening her bikini at the neck.
    It was like holding an audience in the palm of your hand, she thought, that magic moment when a thousand people held their breath as one and waited for permission to breathe again.
    She flipped the clasp that held the top in place and then, after a pause that seemed to last forever, she lowered her lashes and let it go.  It dropped away from her, catching momentarily on the rock before slipping into the water and drifting away.

Click on the Six Sunday link to visit other authors taking part in the program today.

I'm guesting over at Tote Bags and Blogs today - talking about building a heroine.  There's a fun comment comp with a chance to win a book from my backlist.

See you there!

The Last Woman He'd Ever Date winners...

Thanks for dropping by everyone. Loved all your airport scenes - interesting that they were all in hot places!

Sheryl, Diane, Ruchita - if you'll email me your snail mail addy's I'll get copies of the book in the post. Vince I have your address and it's already on its way.

I'm eager to see the US cover for this release - July, I think - and how different the new Riva cover will be when the book is finally released in the UK sometime in the late autumn.

Moving on...

We've had the equinox - the days are now as long as the nights which is brilliant. I love getting up in daylight - it puts, well, a spring in my step. There are swathes of daffodils all along the road into town, too.

The hellebores are in full flower in the garden, and yesterday I spotted a bud on one of the plants I grew from seed a year or two ago. Exciting to see what that looks like.

Meanwhile, following the fun I had with Tempted By Trouble, I'm working on Book 2 in the ice cream saga - Sorrel's story.

My hero, Alexander Laing, remains something of a mystery, but I'm getting there. Here's an idea of what I have in mind.

Weirdly, Sorrel is not impressed. Give her time!

WANT TO WRITE FOR HARLEQUIN ROMANCE?

Exciting opportunity at Harlequin - the Romance line is, right this minute, fast-tracking submission for whole month!

This is the skinny: -

"...we’ll be launching a fast track submission period! Anyone who sends us their first chapter and synopsis between 14th March and 23rd April will hear back from us less than ONE MONTH after the closing date, before the 18th May.

"The email address to send your submission to is romancefasttrack@hqnuk.co.uk. 

"Please attach your first chapter and short synopsis to the email as well as a short query letter, letting us know how much of the manuscript is complete. Please note, we’ll be looking at only one submission per person."

For more about the Romance line, and what the editors are looking for, click here

To discover the wide range of stories the Romance series covers - everything from fun, flirty, sizzle to heart rending emotion, set in exotic locations, great cities and the small town very like the one where you grew up, you can't do better than read the books.

This is a fabulous chance to get your proposal looked at - don't miss it!

A Six Sentence Sunday for Mother's Day!

Today, the fourth Sunday in Lent is Mother's Day in the UK - the day when servant girls were allowed to go home and visit their families, taking a cake and picking wild flowers on the way - so I've chosen my six sentences from my book Secret Baby, Surprise Parents, a story about the perfect gift of surrogacy.

But nothing he had done, nothing he had achieved, not even a hastily conceived and swiftly regretted marriage had ever dulled the memory of that one night they’d spent together and still, in his dreams, his younger self reached out for her.

It had been unbearably worse during the last twelve months.  Sleep had been elusive and when he did manage an hour he woke with an almost desperate yearning for something precious, something that was lost forever. 

This.  This woman clinging to him, this child…

He brushed his lips against her temple and then, his head full of the warm, milky scent of baby, he kissed Posie and for one perfect moment all the pain, all the agony of the last twenty-four hours fell away.

Don't forget to go and check out other Six Sentence Sunday excerpts!

HAPPY ST PATRICK'S DAY!

The Four Dimensional World - Writing Craft

You touch and see in three dimensions. The fourth dimension is the ephemeral. The stuff you hear, smell, taste. Use all the senses.
— Mollie Blake’s Writing Workshop Notes by Liz Fielding

I want you to imagine your heroine arriving at an airport in a strange country. Somewhere she’s never been before. There’s no one to meet her.

Even for those of us who live in Europe, where we usually acquire a passport at birth (and yes, babies have to have their own documentation – a photographer’s nightmare) and will have been waved off on a school trip to France or Germany or Italy or Spain by nervous parents (I know I was that parent!) by the time we’re fourteen, it can be a daunting experience.

How do you describe that? What will bring the scene to life for the reader?

Not a long description of what everything looks like. All modern airports look the same – even if she’s only seen one on television the reader will provide the picture. It’s only in the details that they differ, so focus on those and the emotions they arouse in your heroine.

I travelled widely when I was younger and I once landed at Entebbe in Uganda in the middle of the night. The heat, as I stepped off the plane, wrapped me in a suffocatingly warm, damp blanket. And there was no air-conditioning in the lounge.

My first reaction to Africa was panic – I was never going to survive.

One image that still sticks in my mind is of passing through the airport at Johannesburg many years ago on my way from Botswana to Kenya. I can still conjure up the wide stairway leading up out of the arrivals hall. It was divided into sections and the sign, in Afrikaans, did not need the English translation. One section was for whites only.

Chilling.

Stranded in Cairo when our plane lost an engine, after hours of confusion we were finally found seats on a flight travelling to Frankfurt. Frankfurt was the cleanest, quietest airport I have ever experienced. When our flight to London was called there was no straining to hear the words – there was just a gentle ding-dong of a bell and then the announcement, softly spoken and in crystal clear English.

Reassuring, relaxing. Nearly home.

I remember needing a trolley for my bags when I arrived in Washington a few years back. (a) I couldn’t believe I had to pay to use one (I hadn’t in London) and (b) had to do without and carry my bags as I didn’t have a dollar bill.

Shocked, jetlagged (how the heck could you get a dollar bill into a trolley, anyway – sorry but I come from coin carrying culture!), annoyed. Who knew?

My memories are not of strange signs, different accents or languages, but are all about vivid emotional reactions to the moment. And that’s the key. It’s all about emotion.

So, I’ll ask you again - what is your heroine feeling when she arrives at a strange airport?

I’ve got a very special copy of my next book, The Last Woman He’d Ever Date, for a comment that grabs me – maybe two... It’s special because you’ll only get this edition if you’re signed up to the Mills and Boon Reader Service programme in the UK. If you’re not, you’re going to have to wait until July in the US, or the autumn in the UK, when it will be released in a new-style Riva cover.

Oh, and anyone who says: “Oh my goodness the signs are in Italian/Danish/Japanese…” will be disqualified!

Here’s an introduction to my heroine, to tempt you –

Claire Thackeray swung her bike off the road and onto the footpath that crossed Cranbrook Park estate.
     The “No Cycling” sign had been knocked down by the quad bikers before Christmas and late for work, again, she didn’t bother to dismount.
     She wasn’t a rule breaker by inclination but no one was taking their job for granted at the moment, besides, hardly anyone used the path. The Hall was unoccupied but for a caretaker and any fisherman taking advantage of the hiatus in occupancy to tempt Sir Robert’s trout from the Cran wouldn’t give two hoots. Which left only Archie and he’d look the other way for a bribe.
     As she approached a bend in the path Archie, who objected to anyone travelling faster than walking pace past his meadow, charged the hedge. It was terrifying if you weren’t expecting it — hence the avoidance by joggers — and pretty unnerving if you were. The trick was to have a treat ready and she reached in her basket for the apple she carried to keep him sweet.
      Her hand met fresh air and as she looked down she had a mental image of the apple sitting on the kitchen table, before Archie — not a donkey to be denied an anticipated treat — brayed his disapproval.
     Her first mistake was not to stop and dismount the minute she realised she had no means of distracting him, but while his first charge had been a challenge, his second was the real deal. While she was still on the what, where, how, he leapt through one of the many gaps in the long neglected hedge, easily clearing the sagging wire and she was too busy pumping the pedals in an attempt to outrun him to be thinking clearly.
     Her second mistake was to glance back, see how far away he was and the next thing she knew she’d come to an abrupt and painful halt in a tangle of bike and limbs — not all of them her own — and was face down in a patch of bluebells growing beneath the hedge.

SIX SENTENCE SUNDAY GOES WILD!

I think of the three Beaumont Brides cover, WILD LADY is my favourite. I just love how that guy is smiling, how happy he is to be with that woman.

Here's a six sentence Sunday snippet so that you can get to know them better, too:-

 Offering up a silent prayer that it wouldn't shake, he raised his hand, holding it out in a wordless demand that she bring her dress to him. Surrender completely.

For one long moment she made him wait, made him endure the torture that he had inflicted upon himself, before bending gracefully to pick up her discarded dress, carrying it towards him in two outstretched hands like a precious votive offering from some heathen priestess. But if her stance was that of a supplicant, her eyes were not downcast, they were bright and knowing and her lips were set in a provocative curve. For a moment his resolve wavered as he realised that she had not surrendered. The game had simply moved onto another level.

I've dropped the price on WILD LADY for this weekend's six sentence on Kindle and at Smashwords, to introduce a newly edited version (although the spelling is still English/English!), so if you like it, fill your boots and tell your friends!

And do go and visit the other Six Sentence Sunday writers - it's a great way of finding out whether an author's voice grabs you.

A GREAT DAY OUT!

Harlequin Mills and Boon authors being taken out to lunch by their editors!

Harlequin editorial team with former Editorial Director, Karin Stoecker, who was honoured by RNA with Lifetime Achievement Award

Pamela Hartshorne - Jessica Hart

Sarah Mallory - winner of the RoNA ROSE for The Dangerous Lord Darrington

Anne Herries and her editor, with agent Carole Blake in the middle in the background

If you're going to be a romance fiction prize winner, these mauve suede boots are perfect!

Sarah Mallory with the Betty Neels Rosebowl

Jennifer Taylor, Julie Cohen and Fiona Harper

RIVA COVER SURVEY

Mills and Boon are redesigning the covers for the RIVA series this summer and they want your input.  They have produced three new designs for three books published in the series and they want to know which cover you'd be most likely to pick up. They are new, refreshing, different.

I'm not telling you which I prefer; it's really important to get the views of the readers this series is aimed at. I would, though, be very interested to hear what you love, what you hate, and what about any cover makes you pick it up in the bookstore or supermarket.

What book did you buy recently just because the cover leapt out at you?

To see the covers and add your voice, click on SURVEY

FREEDOM

Rather than write a post of my own this morning, I'm giving you a link to Sarah Duncan's thoughtful blog on the freedoms we have and the need to treasure them.

Pick up a book today, treasure your right to read whatever you like. Never allow anyone to belittle your choice, or take that freedom away from you.

WINNERS!

WE HAVE WINNERS! 

Kate, Anne and I have drawn the winners of the Here Come the Grooms contest and they are: -

Colleen Conklin

Natalija Shkomare

Carol Woodruff

They will all be receiving copies of the following three books -

The Devil and Miss Jones by Kate Walker
Savas's Wildcat - By Anne McAllister
Flirting with Italian - By  Liz Fielding


Flirting With Italian has just received a terrific review from the fabulous Romance Junkies -


FLIRTING WITH ITALIAN is a beautifully rendered tale of love and deception. Ms. Fielding does a fantastic job of accurately portraying a scorned woman named Sarah Gratton who escapes her old life and seeks out a new one in Italy with a slight hope of finding love along the way. Enter a hot, sexy Italian named Matteo di Serrone who just happens to live in the same house as the lady from Sarah’s great-grandpa’s war story. Ms. Fielding deftly weaves many unexpected surprises to the plot of the story, which left me wondering what would happen next. Plus, the author’s wonderful depictions of the lush countryside makes me long to take a trip into Italy. FLIRTING WITH ITALIAN is a smart, sexy, smoldering love story that oozes with seduction. Maybe a little frisky but, oh, so refreshing!