New Voices Finalist!

There's a New Voices Top Four and we're very excited that our own Liz Fielding is mentoring a Warm and Cosy entry! Congrats to Charlotte Phillips and her HONEYMOON WITH A STRANGER - beginning today you can read the pivotal moment and VOTE for the winner. One of the top four get a publishing contract out of the deal so the stakes are sky high!

We wish Charlotte best of luck and are keeping our fingers crossed! We know she's in very good hands with Liz!

Now GO VOTE!

Pop open the Champagne!!!!!!

Get out the bubbly and the fancy glasses! We've got some FANTASTIC news to share today!

First up - our very own Jessica Hart and Barbara Hannay have been named finalists for this year's RITA award in Series Contemporary Romance! Way to go! Jessica's Last Minute Proposal and Barbara's Adopted: Outback Baby got the nod today! The award will be handed out at the RITA ceremony at RWA National Conference, this July in Washington DC.

Congratulations Jessica and Barb!

And in keeping with the awards season theme, Liz Fielding has been listed as a finalist in the Colorado Award of Excellence with her Romance, Wedded in a Whirlwind! Yay Liz!

Donna Alward has also finaled in Love Romances and More's 2008 Golden Rose Awards, with The Soldier's Homecoming up for Best Category Romance! This is a contest where the readers get to have their say: Polls are open here for voting.

And one other very special bit of news this week. There's another brand new addition to the Harlequin Romance family - author Barbara Wallace, whose journey to publication is an inspiration to all aspiring romance authors out there. Barbara will be back later with info on her debut release including the title and release date. Until then,

Congratulations on the sale Barbara and welcome to the family!

April Good News

There are so many things going on this month we're combining some of them all in one post! Hold on to your hats, get out your tootie horns and pop some champagne as we get ready to celebrate the authors of Harlequin Romance!

This past weekend Romantic Times Magazine hosted their annual convention in Pittsburgh. What a showing for our Romance authors!

Trish Wylie won Best Harlequin Romance with Rescued: Mother-To-Be. Way to go, Trish!

Natasha Oakley won Best Harlequin Presents with The Tycoon's Princess Bride. This was part of the Niroli Continuity and we're so very proud of Natasha!

Linda Goodnight won Best Love Inspired with The Heart of Grace.

It just goes to show that the trademark core of emotionalism in Romance is a powerful thing no matter what line you also write for! Congratulations ladies!

And a big cheer for Liz Fielding, who won a Career Achievement Award for Love and Laughter. If you've read Liz's books, you already know she has a specialness about her that is all her own. And a sneaky ability to make you cry, and then laugh in the next heartbeat. Congratulations, Liz.

And what would spring be without the RWA RITA finalists being announced! The Tycoon's Princess Bride (Natasha Oakley) is also up for a RITA in the Short Contemporary category...is this book magical or what!

Carrying on....

Jennie Adams's book To Love and To Cherish was a Blue Ribbon Favourite for the month of March at Romance Junkies, as chosen by their reviewers. Congrats, Jennie!

And, finally, the finalists of the National Reader's Choice Awards have been notified. In the Traditional category we have:

Natasha Oakley - Crowned: An Ordinary Girl

Barbara McMahon - The Boss's Little Miracle

Lucy Gordon - The Mediterranean Rebel's Bride

What a brilliant showing...and this is only the beginning! Congratulations to you all.

One last note...if you haven't already, please enter to win a copy of Claire Baxter's book THE SINGLE DAD'S PATCHWORK FAMILY! Just drop an e-mail to hrablog@hotmail.com with the subject CLAIRE to enter. There's only one week left!

A Special Occasion!

The only thing more exciting than a wedding, would be marking a major milestone like, say, publishing your 50th Harlequin Romance! So what happens when both of these happen at the same time?

What happens is you get the gorgeous pleasure of a Liz Fielding novel, and Liz here herself to celebrate it being her 50th book!

The Bride's Baby is the first book in a miniseries called A Bride For All Seasons. Liz is the Spring Bride. Fiona Harper is Summer, Trish Wylie is Fall, and Shirley Jump winds it all up with her Winter Bride.

Please join the Romance authors in celebrating with Liz! And here she is to tell us more....

THE BRIDE’S BABY, my 50th Harlequin Romance is published this month as the first book in a four-part mini series, A Bride for All Seasons. The heroine, Sylvie Duchamp Smith, is an events planner, but she knows that a wedding is a never-to-be-repeated occasion that has to be perfect and it’s her attention to detail, her determination to deliver the perfect day that has made her the top of every A-list bride’s wish-list. Now, in the cause of The Pink Ribbon Club, a charity founded by her mother, she’s been asked to show the world what her own fantasy day would be like at a Wedding Fayre to be held in her ancestral home, Longbourne Court..

There are countless reasons why she wouldn’t want to go back there. As for fantasy weddings, well, ever since a high-profile wedding she’d been organising had ended in professional disaster when the bride had eloped at the last minute with one of her assistants, she has been doing her best to avoid them. Or think about the jilted groom, billionaire Tom McFarlane, who’d summoned her to his office to go through her account line by line. These days she has baby clothes rather than wedding gowns on her mind.

She’s going to have to do it this one last time, however. Too many people are relying on her to raise the Pink Ribbon Club profile, put their business under the spotlight. It’s just a pity she hadn’t thought to ask the name of the new owner of Longbourne Court…

For excerpts, background, and details of this four-book mini series, go to http://abrideforallseasons.blogspot.com/ and http://www.lizfielding.com/

Congrats Liz! Here's to 50 more!

Spotlight in Six - LIZ FIELDING

Welcome to a new feature of the HRA blog - SPOTLIGHT IN SIX! Each month a different author will answer six questions in a sort of "mini-interview" - and hopefully give you a glimpse into their writing and themselves!

This month we are priveleged to have LIZ FIELDING, whose "REUNITED:MARRIAGE IN A MILLION" is out as the first of the "Secrets We Keep" trilogy.

Without further ado:

After writing fifty books, where do you find new and fresh ideas?

The ideas are easy enough. The world is full of ideas patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharp enough to notice them. Unfortunately the ideas in my head seem to get more and more complicated, not very useful when the contract you signed requires the delivery of three short romances by the next January…

The secret, I think, is to keep it simple, not to get too wound up in complex ideas. To concentrate on the interaction between the hero and heroine. – the internal conflicts.

I read magazines, newspapers, listen to the radio and people watch, filling the well. Then I have to rely on the “girls in the basement” to sift through it all and come up with the goods.


Writers often use photos of celebrities as “casting”. Do you do this, and who has inspired some of your characters?

I don’t “look” for casting pictures as a rule, but sometimes a face, or an actor I’ve seen on film or television will seem just right and then I’ll go looking for photographs to stick on the whiteboard in my office.

Christian Bale seemed an almost perfect likeness for Max Valentine in The Valentine Bride, and Heidi Klum stood in for Louise, but I found them long after I’d started writing the book. I tend to find photographs to match the image in my head, rather than the other way around.

This photograph I found of Hugh Jackman seemed to portray the spirit of Ivo Grenville, the hero of Reunited: Marriage in a Million. He’s still, totally controlled, giving nothing away, especially not his feelings. Ivo to the core. Having a picture on my website and blog does, I think, help the readers to see the kind of man he is, too. It was much more difficult to find a picture that matched my idea of Belle. She is upfront sexy but, like Ivo, she’s hiding a lot and the bombshell image is no more than a veneer. The photograph I eventually found seems just about perfect – although I have no idea of my model’s true identity. Of course, the fact that the art department muddled up my heroine with Jackie Braun’s Claire in the third book in the “Secrets We Keep” trilogy, Found: Her Long Lost Husband, will now confuse the reader totally!

I’ve recently seen Alexander Niddiq in a couple of films and he has become the face of the Sheikh in the novella I’m writing at the moment.

What are your favourite and least favourite parts of writing a novel? Is there a particular section that you struggle with?

The favourite bit is where my editor says she likes it. It’s even better if she says there are no revisions -- rare enough to be a deeply cherished moment.

The truth is, that writing is hard and, like all creative work, it gets harder as you dig deeper each time. The need to lift yourself to write something new and fresh, within the confines of the romance genre, something that isn’t like anything you’ve ever written before, is akin to reinventing the wheel. It has to the do the same job, but not in the same way.

Fortunately all characters are different. They react differently to pressure and that’s the great part -- creating characters that live and breath so they carry my story forward is the most rewarding thing about writing.

The bits I hate are those moments when the characters hit a blank wall. They want to do something and you can’t see any way to make that happen.


When you are not writing, what do you do? How do you pamper yourself?

I pamper myself with books. My idea of the perfect break is sitting in some shady spot overlooking the sea, with a good book, a glass of something interesting and a few olives within reach. No music, no television, no interruptions of any kind. One day of that is probably all I could stand, but it remains the ideal!

What I actually do is catch up on all the stuff that goes by the wayside when I’m writing. Ironing. Dusting. Getting my eyes tested. Stripping wallpaper…


Imagine you’re stranded…where are you and who are you with?

Briefly, in a lift?

With the Prime Minister so that could tell him exactly where he’s going wrong. :)

In trouble, on a mountain?

With mountaineer hunk, Chris Bonnington.

Long term, on a desert island?

Can I have my own version of “Desert Island Discs”, here? In lieu of gramophone records, the question is, which eight men would you take with you…

Just to look at, obviously, as, stripped to the waist they gather firewood, built me a hut, caught fish, shinned up palm trees to pick coconuts…

Hugh Jackman
David Tenant
Paul Bettany
Johnny Depp
Alexander Niddiq
Gerard Butler
Denzel Washington

And for fabulous conversation (and because he’s sexy, too) …

Clive James


Finally, Liz, please tell us what’s up and coming for you in the months ahead!

Coming up in September in the UK, is BRINGING UP BABY, a three-in-one By Request, with Marion Lennox and Jessica Hart.

Then January 2008 sees the publication of my fiftieth book, THE SHEIKH’S UNSUITABLE BRIDE.

It was only when I’d agreed the title with my editor and was entering it in my log (vital to keep a note of the names of heroes and heroines – it’s so easy to think you’ve found a fabulous hero name only to discover you’ve already used it) that I realized that I’d hit the big five-o. It’s not that I can’t count, it’s that not all of them are “Romance” titles, so there are two logs.

In this book, Sheikh Zahir, who made an appearance last year in THE SHEIKH’S GUARDED HEART, knows that he can’t put off marriage any longer. His father wants a grandson and, since arranged marriages are the way they do it in his part of the world, he heads off to London for the biggest business venture of his life, leaving his mother to search for a suitable “mother of his sons”. And then, on his arrival in London, he’s met not by his usual chauffeur, but by Diane Metcalfe, a woman who has opinions by the bucketful and isn’t afraid to share them. Who talks non-stop, has a smile to melt perma-frost and red-gold hair that unfurls in tiny curls against her creamy neck. His head knows that any kind of relationship between them is impossible. His heart – and several other parts of his anatomy – are not listening.

You can find REUNITED: MARRIAGE IN A MILLION on http://www.eharlequin.com/, http://www.amazon.com/ (or co.uk) and of course in bookstores this month!

Thanks, Liz, for joining us!!!!!

Back Online!

I'm pleased to announce that the Harlequin Romance Authors blog is back online! Join us every month for new releases, breaking news, and spotlights on your favourite Romance authors!

Coming soon:

News from RWA Nationals!
Fabulous August Releases!
Spotlight in Six with Liz Fielding!

Cheers,

Donna