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Okay, we’re well into the New Year – a whole two and a bit weeks – and I’ve already been tardy on the blog updates. I’m going to blame the fact that I’ve condensed my life down to a single small bedroom in my mother’s house – and, really, I think it’s a pretty good excuse! Last time we moved home from New Zealand (yes, we’ve moved countries before. Nuts, huh?) we moved back into our own home. But we sold our house a couple of years ago, and this time we came home to…nothing. Our furniture has therefore gone into storage, and we have wedged ourselves and our five suitcases full of clothes into my mother’s spare bedroom.

She’s been incredibly generous, rearranging her house for us, smiling bravely while we invade her space. I’m sure she’s secretly dreaming of a time when she won’t come home and find my shoes kicked off in the living room or a coffee cup abandoned on the coffee table, but she’s doing a damned good job of pretending she’s enjoying the company and my cooking while we’re here.

How long will this limbo last, I hear you ask? Good question! We currently have our eye on a house. It doesn’t go to auction until late in February. If we miss out on it, we have decided to rent and look for somewhere to buy at our leisure. If we get it…well, then we’re opening up a whole new can of worms because this place needs some serious DIY love and tenderness. But we’ll get to that when we get to it…

On the book front, I am finishing revisions on my latest Blaze, due out in September, I believe. It’s called Hot Island Nights and is the story of Elizabeth, a somewhat prim, somewhat repressed English woman who finds herself in Australia at the beachside community of Cowes on Philip Island, trying to resist the lures of local hottie Nathan. Nathan isn’t all he appears to be, however – or, more accurately, he’s a lot more than he appears to be. Hi jinx ensue. I’m looking forward to the cover art on this one, let me tell you!

On the release front, Her Secret Fling is in bookshops RIGHT NOW. So if you’re one of those people who likes a hard copy book and not an ebook, you need to grab it before it’s replaced by next month’s crop of Blazes. I’ve had some great reader letters on this book and I’m tickled pink that people are enjoying it. It’s had some nice reviews around the blog sites, too.

Okay, I’m going to dive into revisions for the day. Until next time!

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I hope the festive season brings much happiness, laughter, love and contentment to you and yours. Have a great time!

Sarah

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Okay. It’s official. Her Secret Fling is now available over at Harlequin, even though the rest of the world won’t be selling it until January. Gotta love that early release program!!

I’m sure I’ve blogged about this book before, but I’m going to do it again. What the hey! Her Secret Fling is one of those “hate at first sight” stories – you know, the one’s where your first impressions are turned upside down once you get to know each other. I have to say, I had an enormous amount of fun writing the dialogue for this book – Poppy and Jake don’t give each other a lot of quarter when the gloves come off, which gave me license to have a good time. I love banter between romantic leads – His Girl Friday is one of my all time favorite movies because of the zingy back and forth between Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.

The idea for this story grew out of me wondering what would happen when a one night stand is forced by circumstances into becoming something more. Poppy and Jake think they’re all about physical intimacy, but then Life intervenes and suddenly they’re dealing with intense emotional intimacy as well. I should probably warn you that I cried a little while I wrote bits of this book. I know, I know – Home For the Holidays has been getting lots of comments about being a tearjerker, and I promise I’m not on a tear-jerker rampage. But I really wanted to push these people into a corner and force them to get past their preconceptions. And I hope the sad bits will be worth it for readers in the end.

I’ve had a lovely time chatting to readers over at various blogs recently – Romconinc and The Season, and of course over at the Blaze authors blog. I’ll be there on the 5th giving away two copies of Her Secret Fling, so pop over and have a chat if you’d like to go in the draw.

I’ll be moving house – and countries! – next week, so it’s going to be interesting times! Until next time…

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Okay, let me get the gratuitous self-promotional plug out of the way first – my latest book is on the shelves RIGHT NOW. Home For the Holidays is a Super Romance and you can find an excerpt on the books page, as well as some behind-the-scenes stuff from when I was writing the book.

Okay, plug over. Phew! Now, onto other matters….

My partner and I are currently in the process of moving countries – New Zealand to Australia, to be exact. We have been in New Zealand for two years and I’m very much looking forward to being back home where I can go watch my nephews play basketball on the weekends and attend my niece’s calisthenics reviews. It will be fantastic to be able to just drop in and annoy my family any old time I feel like it (not sure how they will feel about this, but what the hey!)

One of the things I’m also looking forward to is having our own home again. We sold up before we set sail for NZ, and now that we’re going home we’re going to be doing the old real estate trawl again, dealing with lies, lies, lies from real estate sharks and gnawing our fingers to the bone at auctions. Once that bit is over, however, we will once again have our own space. Yay!

If we don’t like the carpet or the curtains or the wall color, we can change it. What bliss! I have two years of pent-up home decoration just waiting to burst out of me. I’ve even been keeping a little file of ideas, just in case we need to re-model a kitchen or bathroom or garden or patio or whatever. I’ve also been fantasising about setting up my office properly and having all my books around me again (we left most behind in storage, including my beloved Georgette Heyer collection).

So, because I’m excited, I’m going to share a couple of my more whimsical decorating fancies with you. These aren’t necessarily going to make it into our new home, mind, but they’re on my radar right now.

How cute is this wall decal? No idea what room I will put this in, but I adore it because it's cute and a little bit rude. You can find them at Etsy,click on the piccie to be linked to the manufacturer's site.

This is wallpaper. Pretty cool, huh? Also kind of psychodelic. I'm thinking feature wall, possibly in my study. But I might have to work with my back to it with all that color popping out at me! To give you an idea of scale, that image would cover a whole wall - each can of caviar is about the same diameter as the average car tire. Click on the piccie to be linked to the manufacturer's website - they have some kooky/cool stuff!

Okay, admit it – you think my house is going to look like a sideshow at the circus, don’t you? It just might, by the time I’m finished with it. We’ll see!

Until next time, happy reading!

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So if you’re looking for a paper copy (as opposed to an ebook) your time starts now! People who aren’t readers of category romance are always surprised when I explain that Harlequin books are only available on book store shelves for 30 days. Of course, thanks to the internet, they’re around for a lot longer than that these days, which is great for writers, and, I hope, readers.

We’re still thrashing around in the middle of pre-moving-countries mess. I’ve been flat out doing revisions on a stand alone book that I will be start sending out to publishers in the next little while. I must say, it feels very strange to be back at square one again, trying to find someone who likes my voice and my story and thinks they can sell me. But this is what writing for publication is all about, so I am preparing to gird my loins and plunge into the fray… For anyone who is interested, the book is a bit of a departure from my Blazes and Superromances in that it’s written in first person. It’s more chick lit than straight romance, although there’s a very strong romantic subplot (couldn’t live without my romance!!!) and it’s about a woman who embarks on a journey to get healthy when she has an epiphany (of sorts) at her high school reunion and realises she’s put on a great deal of weight.

While I have never been as big as the heroine in my book, I have had my own weight/self esteem battles so this is definitely a book from the heart. And yes, it was uncomfortable writing some of the scenes, as well as very empowering and rewarding. I hope I get a chance to share it with readers. Fingers crossed!!!

Now, onto the very important subject of shoes. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say I have a shoe fetish, as such, I definitely have a thing for shoes (my man would say that thing was a credit card, I suspect!). Anyway, when I can find something gorgeous or interesting or kooky over the next little while, I’m going to post piccies of my Shoe of the Moment. This week’s is actually one of my own, a recent addition to my collection that has had a couple of outings this week.

These boots are made by a Spanish company called Prophecy. Unlike this piccie, which is dark blue, mine are dark green patent leather. Cool heel, huh? Feel free to direct me to your own favorite shoes – I’m always up for some vicarious thrills.

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Last time I blogged I promised a review of 500 Days of Summer should we go see it. Well, we did. Barely. Let me explain.

Both myself and my partner had high hopes regarding this movie. It got some fantastic reviews from critics talking about “reinventing the romantic comedy genre” etc, etc. I think I may have commented before that I am always a little wary of anyone who is supposedly reinventing anything, but I was keen to see what all the fuss was about.

Well, for me, it was about nothing. I wanted to like this movie, I really did. Every time I go to the movies I go anticipating fun and entertainment and pleasure. I positively ache to be entertained, in fact. I absolutely adore Joseph Gordon Levitt. I loved him in Brick(a bold attempt at film noir set in a high school), and I think he’s very, very talented (and cute, too!). Zoe Deschanel I’m not so wild about, mostly because she seems to have made a career out of playing the same dead-pan, hard-to-get-excited, too-cool-for-her-own-good character. I tried to put my prejudice aside, however, and settled in to watch. And was very quickly bored. Just…bored. The dialogue was rarely witty or challenging or interesting. The jumping-around-time-cuts didn’t add anything to the film or story or character development for me. They were just edits, really, and they basically just meant that you saw the bus crash coming long before you would normally.

My man and I both looked at each other after about 20 minutes and did a bit of eyebrow semaphore to discuss the notion of leaving the cinema and crashing another movie instead. Then I got all school-girl swotty and reminded him that we should really watch the movie all the way through so we can make sure we weren’t just reacting to one bad bit.

Apart from the boredom, the other bit that really annoyed me in this movie was that Summer, the love interest, very neatly sets herself up a handy escape hatch in the opening stages of the relationship. She tells the hero that she doesn’t want anything serious, and asks if he’s cool with casual. Then she proceeds to have a relationship with him, with this lovely little caveat built in up front. When she decides it’s time to go, she reminds him that she warned him, which I assume meant took away his right to feel hard done by or hurt.

This made me sooo angry (can you tell?!!) If she wasn’t interested in a relationship, she should have never kissed this guy who clearly adored her. She should never have allowed their relationship to develop into real intimacy. Later, after they’ve broken up, she dances with him at a mutual friend’s wedding and is very friendly and come hither – and he later discovers she’s actually engaged to be married. More dishonesty from Summer, who seems unable to consider anybody’s needs but her own.

As a study of a selfish, immature girl-woman who breaks an idealistic young guy’s heart, 500 Days of Summer works. But please don’t tell me it’s reinventing the romantic comedy genre. What little romance there is is undercut very quickly, and the laughs are few and far between. I expect more from my rom-coms. I’ll take The Proposal, with all its transparent set pieces and Hollywood schlockiness any day over boredom and dishonesty and frustration. Any. Day.

Okay. Ranty review over. I promise to be more chipper next time. In fact, I’ll go so far as to guarantee it…

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I’m stealing the idea for this blog from the Dear Author and Smart Bitches ladies over at the Borders blog (phew, how’s that for a provenance?). I would like to take a moment to honor all the lovely men I know. Don’t get me wrong – I know a lot of lovely women, too. But men get such a hard time in the press. We always hear about the bad stuff and not the good stuff, so I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge some of the truly gentle and loving men I know.

There’s Doug, who has cared for his wheel-chair bound wife for over thirty years after she had a debilitating stroke after a brain operation. He is patient and tireless in his care and love for her. There’s also my friend’s father, who has recently nursed his wife of more than thirty-five years through the last stages of kidney failure. He looked after her 24/7 for nearly three years, right up until the end. The only time he had to himself were his weekly squash games, which his friends arranged at whatever odd hour he was able to get away from his wife’s bedside.

There’s also my BIL, who is a loving, patient, funny, very involved father. I love watching him with his kids – how much he enjoys and loves them, the way they all laugh with each other. He’s a very caring and gentle man.

Then, of course, there’s my man, who really is the rock of my life. He has stood by me through so many crises, we’ve travelled the world together, survived health problems, moved internationally not once but four times… The list goes on and on. He’s funny, he’s smart, he’s talented. He’s incredibly patient. And he’s kind. Very, very kind and generous with his skill and his love and his understanding.

I don’t think I could write romance novels if I didn’t genuinely really love and enjoy men. I don’t understand them all the time, mind. But I enjoy their differences and the way they come at things differently from women (or me, anyway!) and I love their energy.

The male character in my November Superromance, Home For the Holidays (you knew there was going to be a plug in here somewhere, right? I’m starting to get the hang of this promotion thing) is an ordinary, everyday hero. Joe Lawson has had to pick up his life after his wife died in a car accident and try to be both mother and father to his two children. He’s lonely and angry about losing the woman he loved. He doesn’t think he’s even close to being ready to look at another woman yet. Then he meets Hannah. Now, Hannah isn’t a walk in the park. She comes with some serious baggage. And it seems like these two are just never going to get it together. And then they do, and fate steps in to throw one of life’s toughest challenges at them – and like a real hero, Joe rises to the occasion, as many good men do every day in all our lives.

I really enjoyed writing this book. It was a sook-fest in parts because I found it very emotional, but I hope readers think it was worth it and that they get a few hours of pleasure out of Hannah and Joe’s story.

Till next week…

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Home For The Holidays, my second Superromance, is available now at www.eharlequin. com It won’t be available in actual stores until November, but it’s available on early release at Harlequin’s site right now, and, of course as an e-book.

In other news, I am nearly finished with the first chapter of my new book. I spent all of last week writing, deleting, writing, deleting. I think I came up with three different ways to start the damn thing, and eventually I wound up combining all three into one. I am finally happy with it, I think, and about to introduce the hero’s POV. And then…let the games begin!

First chapters are always hard. Setting up characters, delivering backstory – but not too much! – building in hooks, etc, etc. Sometimes you just have to silence the inner critic and write and trust that your gut is leading you in the right direction.

Off to see 500 Days of Summer at the movies this week. It’s been getting a lot of good press about being a “reinvention of the conventions of the romantic comedy”. I’m always deeply suspicious of these kinds of comments, but who knows, maybe it is. Shall report back once we’ve seen it.

Until then…

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I’m just back from a quick flit “across the ditch”, as we say, from Auckland to Sydney. My friend was running a special charity night for her little boy’s school, and I went across to support her. It was a great night and lots of money was raised for Woodbury, a special school that helps children with autism. Poor Jo was exhausted at the end of it all, but she did an awesome job. Can’t wait to see what the final figure raised was.

I also took the opportunity to drive around and visit some of my favorite haunts in Sydney. I visited the Queen Victoria Building in the middle of the city, a beautiful restored Victorian-era building that is now full of delicious shops, and I went across to Oxford Street, Paddington, to visit the Saturday market that is held in the church grounds over there. This has to be one of the best markets in Australia for up and coming designers in clothing and jewelry. There was some very cool stuff and I wish I had a bigger suitcase and bank account to accommodate my many hankerings.

I’m about to start in on my next Blaze, tentatively titled Losing It – my titles always change, so I try not to get too attached to them. At this stage, it’s about an English woman who discovers weeks before her marriage to the wrong man that although her grandparents, who brought her up, have told her that both her parents died in a car accident when she was very young, it was in fact her step-father who died, and her real father is alive and well and living in Australia. Shaken, she impulsively flies to Australia to find him, even though it’s just weeks before her wedding. She travels to Philip Island, a small island about an hour and a half’s drive south from Melbourne, but when she goes to her father’s last known address she encounters Nathan, a sexy, amorous beach bum. Or so she thinks… I say “at this stage” because sometimes things that look good when I am plotting don’t work so well in the writing. But that’s all part of the process, and I usually manage to hack my way through the word jungle.

Starting a new book is a weird feeling. A bit like standing on the high dive board, trying to get up the gumption to jump in. I tend to procrastinate a little bit – read through my synopsis, set up the file, consider writing in a different font, just for a change, you know, then revert back to the usual courier… I can fritter away HOURS like this. Then I bog in and start getting pulled into the world that I’m trying to create. And I don’t emerge again until I get spat out the other end of the book.

There are some moments in this book that I am really looking forward to writing, moments that really tickle my funny bone. And I have already decided that I am going to adjust the heroe’s background – I think it’s a little grim at the moment, so I want to adjust that a little, make it less so. Or maybe when I take a good look at the story I will feel this needs to be the way it is. Who knows?

I promised a review of Funny People last time I blogged. This is the new Judd Apatow/Adam Sandler movie. Well, I really enjoyed it. Yes, too long, yes, too rambly, but I really enjoyed the characters, and it’s full of laughs because it’s about stand up comedians. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say it has the highest quotient of penis jokes in it out of any movie I’ve ever seen. Eric Bana, that Aussie hottie, is in it, and he’s hilarious. The scene where he tries to explain Aussie rules football to the Americans is priceless, not least because every second word begins with “f”. We Aussies like a bit of a swear, we do. So this scene made me and my partner howl with laughter. So, if you’re prepared to be patient and just kind of go along for the ride, Funny People is good fun. Well, it was for me, anyway.

And for those of you looking for the latest news on my books:

I have a new Superromance out in November in the US – Home For the Holidays. You can find a link to the cover, excerpt, and Behind The Scenes information on this book on the My Books page of my website. There’s also a page for my March 09 Blaze, She’s Got It Bad, and my first Superromance, A Natural Father, as well.

My next release after November will be a January Blaze, Her Secret Fling.

Okay. Better start writing for the day! Cheers for now!

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It’s Sunday, 5.24pm, I’m still in my jim-jams, I’ve eaten Coco Pops for lunch and bread and butter for breakfast…But it’s done!!!!! Revisions on my latest Superromance, titled Her Best Friend (I think, or did I just dream that my wonderful ed, Wanda, and I agreed on this
title?) are complete. Yahooooo!

I still need to read it through another million times and smooth out all the rough bits and delete my little writing tics and whatnot, but I have two more days (that’s a whole 48 hours, right? And I’ve still got most of a box of Coco Pops left to sustain me) to get the red pen out and clean the manuscript up. At this stage, in a perfect world, it’s always nice to put the book aside for a few weeks and then come back to it when you’ve got a bit of distance and can be more ruthless and less emotional about cutting stuff, but that luxury is not to be mine this time around. I’m on a tight deadline, so it will be full submersion for a couple more days. Such is life.

I figure I deserve a bit of break from the computer at this stage, so I’m hoping to get to the movies tonight to see Funny People, the new Judd Apatow movie starring Adam Sandler. The critics are all saying it’s too long, and that it’s really two movies grafted together and that neither knows when to end, but I am a fan of Adam Sandler, particularly when he’s playing a more serious part (Punch Drunk Love, anyone?). Although it must be said I am also a huge fan of more silly movies like Happy Gilmore, too. There’s always room for another fart joke in my life.

Anyway, a trip to the movies will require me to shower and do my hair and engage with real people instead of fictional ones. This is all good! I’ll try and jot down my thoughts on the movie if I get a chance, on the off chance anyone is interested.

For anyone looking for news on my latest releases:
I have a new Superromance out in November in the US – Home For the Holidays. You can find a link to the cover, excerpt, and Behind The Scenes information on this book on the My Books page of my website. There’s also a page for my March 09 Blaze, She’s Got It Bad, and my first Superromance, A Natural Father, as well.

My next release after November will be a January Blaze, Her Secret Fling.

Okay, enough from me for now. I’m off to do a celebratory dance! Meeting deadline is always a wonderful feeling…

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