Please, Mr Postman, Where Are My Golden Heart Entries?

The Golden Heart contest is one of the most important for unpublished romance writers. Each year, the organisers receive about 1,000 entries in 10 different categories. These are whittled down to 100 entries. Acquiring editors at publishing houses judge the finalists, and the winners are announced at a ceremony often dubbed the Oscars for romance writers. In this contest, though, winning isn't everything--many past finalists have gone on to publication as a result of the comp.

This year, I entered two YA manuscripts. I forked out over 200 bucks in entry, stationery and postage fees. ("I'm stimulating the economy," I assured myself.) I airmailed the mss from Australia to the US on November 15. Usually, it takes up to seven days for mail to reach its destination. Plenty of time, I thought, to meet the December 2 deadline. If entries don't make it to RWA's Texas office by then, they're disqualified.

But yesterday, day 14 after mailing, I realised it wasn't looking good for my entries. They still haven't made it. How can this be? Did they get chucked into the seamail postbox instead of the airmail one? Did the plane's pilot make a detour in Tahiti and decide to stay? Or maybe a disgruntled postal worker delivered the mail to the garbage dump.

Ironically, the same thing happened to me about a month ago, when I had to snail-mail my final-round entry for the Golden Pen Award. The preliminary round in that comp is judged by Golden Heart finalists/winners. Somewhere, somehow, my mail went astray.

Whatever the reason, I had to take action this time.

Or rather, my dad did.

He lives in America, so he told me to email my entries and he'd take care of the rest. Despite sore, arthritic fingers and crippling back pain, he stayed up till the early hours of this morning, printed out a whole pine tree's worth of manuscript pages, collated and bound them, burnt my full mss to disks, and sent them off by FedEx. Three cheers for Dad!

Now getting to the final round in the GH means more than ever. It's one way to pay Dad back for helping me out so readily.

Six Degrees of Celluloid

Twelve years ago, when I was a cinema manager, I met visionary director Baz Luhrmann at the premiere screening of Romeo + Juliet. Last night I had one of my recurring cinema nightmares, where I relived the time smoke from nearby bushfires set off the fire alarms and I had to evacuate hundreds of irate patrons several times in one day. Tonight, Luhrmann, Kidman and Jackman (is there a grammatical term for names ending in 'man'?) open their epic film Australia in Sydney. I'll try to overcome my cinema phobia to see it. I just hope I won't need to be evacuated.

I doubt Luhrmann approved this trailer found on YouTube,
but all publicity's good publicity, right?


Tourism Australia commissioned Baz to help entice overseas visitors to our shores
in a new campaign.


Kidman and Luhrmann - together again - for Chanel No. 5.
My favourite piece of classical music, Debussy's Clair de Lune,
underscores this gorgeous ad.

Quick Fiction Fix

If you're an Aussie or a Kiwi reader, you must pick up a copy of this week's Woman's Day magazine. Inside you'll find a delightful historical short story written by my buddy, Anna Campbell. I nabbed my local convenience store's last mag this morning. Be quick!

Here she is with Harlequin Presents author Annie West (left)
at Guildford Library.

Stack of Macs

I never considered myself much of a collector...until I cleaned out my study today and realised I have a veritable Apple Mac museum.



At the bottom of the stack is my very first computer, the Apple PowerBook 180. It has a grayscale display and the memory of a calculator. (Okay, it was far more powerful, and one of the best computers you could get at the time.) The keyboard is actually one of the most comfortable I've ever used.

When the Internet age dawned, it was time to upgrade to the black PowerBook G3 made famous by Carrie Bradshaw. My then boyfriend (now husband; you can see why I married him) bought it for me. I'll never forget the day he surprised me with it--he'd opened a Word doc and typed the immortal phrase, "Meanwhile, downtown..." I started and finished my first novel on that computer.



Fortunately, I never suffered the motherboard problems Carrie endured. But then the little white iBook G4 laptops came along. They were far more alluring than a pair of Manolos. At this stage, I was struggling with a repetitive strain injury and had to use voice recognition software. The old PowerBook just didn't have enough RAM to run the program. On the iBook I wrote my second, third and fourth books.

And then came the aluminium (aluminum, for those of you in the US) MacBook, pictured at the top. I'm hoping to get a few more novels out of this little beauty.

I'm off to work on book six, but I'll leave you with more pics from the collection.

Oldest to youngest.

Mr Authorness's MacBook Pro (second from the right) joined the line-up for this one.

They just look so pretty from all angles, don't they?

The Seven-Year Itch

This week I left the company I worked for after almost seven years. Aside from being paid to watch The Bold and the Beautiful, I'll miss my wonderful colleagues.

Just because I resigned doesn't mean I won't ever see them again, though. All I have to do is hang out at YouTube. Here are two of my former workmates, Gibson and Belinda, who are also actors. Gib's in the Nintendo ads, or TVCs as they're called in the biz, while Belinda is Tall Jan in the All-Bran cereal ad.


Gibson as Cowboy Jed. The TVCs were directed by Bob Dylan's son, Jesse, and filmed in New Zealand. When Gib returned from shooting the campaign, he treated us all to gigantic boxes of Krispy Kremes to celebrate. You can also see Gibson in the Nicolas Cage film Ghost Rider.


And here's lovely Belinda as Tall Jan. (She really is tall). Belinda recently starred in the Sydney production of My Name is Rachel Corrie.

Somebody Call a Doctor!

Our government recently announced a pledge to crack down on the use of skinny models and unrealistic images in the media. Under the proposed code of conduct, magazines and advertisers must add a disclaimer to images that have been doctored. The initiative aims to address body image issues and unattainable ideals. Even the real Beyonce doesn't have a body like the Beyonce we see in touched-up photographs.

These pics from the hilarious blog Photoshop Disasters, however, don't need a disclaimer. A little tweak here, a little tweak there... Next thing you know, limbs go flying everywhere.

Miley Cyrus: Look, Ma! Three hands!



Ah, là est mon nombril vers le haut là dans les collines.
J'aipensé que je perdu il pour de bon.
(TRANSLATION: Oh, there's my navel up there in the hills.
I thought I'd lost it for good.)


Want Fanta? I think the Fantanas need a hand.


Something a little more sinister. Spot the difference in these two pics featuring Prince William.


Best-selling author Christina Dodd's now infamous cover for her novel CASTLES IN THE AIR. The heroine has three hands. As you can see, the hero is thrilled.

Rewrite Relief

I've just finished the rewrites on my paranormal YA. Yee-ha!

This manuscript has had so many past lives. The first draft--completed way back in 2004--was written in third-person past tense and just scraped over the 45,000 mark. I had a heroine people either loved or hated and, truthfully, a rather insipid plot. The ms did okay in competitions, but received an impressive number of rejections from agents. Four years and much tinkering later, the main and subplots are totally different, it's in first-person present tense, I hope my heroine is more sympathetic and likable, and the word count has almost doubled. Is it perfect? Probably not, but I can tell you it's a hundred times better than that first draft.

Many thanks to my critique crew, plus my agent's assistant, Beth, and an intern at WH, who all gave me invaluable advice.

A whole slew of craft books also helped me through the latest revision. Click on the links to see the Amazon reviews.

• MANUSCRIPT MAKEOVER by Elizabeth Lyon. I really had to raise the stakes in my book, and Lyon's chapters on characterization and structure showed just how to do it.
  
• SELF-EDITING FOR FICTION WRITERS by Renni Browne & Dave King. I liked the authors' solutions to proportion problems--when you spend too much time describing minor points and skimp on the scenes that really need to be big.
  
• GMC: GOAL, MOTIVATION & CONFLICT by Debra Dixon. Work out each main character's goal, motivation and conflict, and you'll give your story dimension and direction. This particularly helped me when I was bogged down in that swamp known as the Saggy Middle.
  
• NOW WRITE! edited by Sherry Ellis. A collection of tried-and-tested exercises to whip lax writing muscles into shape.
  

So, what's next? Both me and the book will rest for a while. Then I'll dive into another YA that I've kept in a holding pattern for nine months, and catch up on all that reading...

Books, Glorious Books

I'm in the final stages of rewriting a YA manuscript. I've been at it since March. One thing I'm soooo looking forward to when I get that over and done with is tackling this tower of books to read. I bought most of them on my recent trip to the US (I had to buy an extra cabin bag, too). There are 17 titles here, not counting Stephenie Meyer's BREAKING DAWN, which I've almost finished. That's my incentive book--I'll revise/rewrite two chapters in my book, then read a chapter of Stephenie's latest as a reward.

The others are stacked in no particular order, but I think it's wise to start with MANAGING TIME from the Harvard Business School Press...

Horsing Around

As you can tell, my blog posts have been infrequent of late and I do apologise for that. But I have been busy with the day job, house renovations, revising a novel, etc. I also blame our city council, which sent every residence a lump of clay in the hope the inhabitants would sculpt a horse out of it.

Why?

Well, our suburb was once a multi-horse town, where working horses delivered milk, bread, household items and, puzzlingly, rabbits. Today the narrow roads are filled with parked cars because few houses have garages. Before, our street housed stables for Clydesdales who worked for stationery company WC Penfold. So to celebrate our horsey past, artist Annie Kennedy devised an art installation called The Stables. Locals were encouraged to massage their free lumps of clay into something that resembles a horse, and the results will be exhibited from October 11 to October 26.

Here's my horse, Erko, who's a little bit wonky, bumpy and out of proportion, but can actually stand on her own four feet. Neigh!

Finally, A New Post

I've just returned from a long holiday overseas and my brain is beginning to warm up...

Back in July, I flew over to gorgeous San Francisco (picking up four lovely and talented NZ writers Sara Hantz, Amanda Ashby, Ellie Huse and Shelley Munro in Auckland on the way) for Romance Writers of America's annual conference. Shelley's husband had organised for us to travel from SFO to the Marriott in style--with a stretch limo. (A sharp contrast to the shuttle bus I was herded into after the conf.)

In the following five days raged a battle between me and an invisible foe called Jet Lag. However, I still managed to have a terrific time at my first American conference. Most of the workshops I attended were run by YA writers, including the gracious and talented Trish Milburn, who'd recently critiqued my work.

Screenwriters from All My Children and Guiding Light provided memorable insights into writing soaps that translate well into other genres:

* Give your characters a secret--it doesn't have to be revealed to the audience, but it affects the way they see the world and interact with others.
* Make characters dark and find a way to redeem them.
* When you're developing a scene, think of the best and worst things that could happen to the character.
* On soaps, head writers devise plots for a three- to six-month time frame, then breakdown scriptwriters write the episodes. (And sometimes breakdown scriptwriters verge on breakdowns themselves when they have to reincarnate characters who have died in previous seasons.)
* Soap operas were devised by Procter and Gamble to promote their products.

In another workshop, I learned the fundamental differences between a suspense, a thriller and a mystery:
* Suspense novels are all about the anticipation of danger
* Thrillers are about the future
* Mysteries are about the past.

I can't remember who said this, but there's a gap in the YA market for mysteries, thrillers, and books for boys. I also believe Jennifer Klonsky from Simon Pulse is on the lookout for superhero, paranormal, commercial, and fun novels.

Cindi Myers, who's always so generous in passing on market information to fellow writers, had this to say about amping up productivity:
* Don't know where all your time goes? Chart your time on a calendar or planner and ID blocks of time that could be better used for writing.
* Use a ritual to trigger writing time. (For instance, you could play a certain song that inspires you; eat a set number of chocolate bars; whatever works for you.)

Of course, it wasn't all work and no play. The Australian/New Zealand contingent numbered around 30, which I think is a record. One of the biggest highlights was the exclusive Harlequin cocktail party. I scored an invite from Laura, Nora Roberts' publicist, after we volunteered at the registration desk together. And I got to meet la Nora herself! (It was a brief meeting, but a meeting nonetheless!) Harlequin Spice author Cathleen Ross forced me to dance to Bon Jovi and ABBA songs after our indulgent visit to the chocolate fountain.

The conference culminated in the RITA Awards, which really is the equivalent of the Oscars. Sparkly gowns galore. My treasured friend Anna Campbell was up for two awards for Best Historical, and NZ author Emily Gee was also nominated for two awards.

Thank you to:
* Sara, Amanda and Ellie for inviting me to dinners and brekkies, and being wonderful travel companions.
* Marley Gibson for telling me about her ghost-hunting trips. Spooooooky!
* Trish Milburn, Christine Wells, Anna Campbell and all the Banditas for inviting me to their party.
* RWA for a fabulous conference. Great workshops and great people.
* The housekeepers at the Marriott on Fourth Street.
* San Francisco, where I left a piece of my heart and almost lost my wallet.

What I wish I'd done:
* Arrived a few days earlier to get over the jet lag. The last day of the conf was the first time I felt even slightly human.
* Worked up the courage to introduce myself to more authors, especially those I'm in awe of. There's one author I really should've said hi to, but I felt like such a dork.
* This list could get long and boring, so I'll hold it there. Have a look at some pics instead.

The delightful Christine Wells,
whose new release, The Dangerous Duke, is out now.

Sara Hantz and Wendy Toliver.

Paula Roe, Harlequin author, my website designer,
and all-round fabulous person.

Two Aussie icons: Denise Rossetti and a Tim Tam
(that chocolatey thing on the champers bottle).

(L-R) Shelley Munro, Ellie Huse, Sara Hantz in the limo.

Amanda Ashby, with whom I have so much in common it's scary! 

(But nice!)

The streets of San Francisco.

Me and Anna Campbell.

We're the A Team--crit partners. (L-R) Anna Campbell, 

Cathleen Ross, brand-new Berkley author Kandy Shepherd,
and me wearing an accessory that is more tragic than tres chic.