Beyond the Hearts and Flowers

I'm back. Did you even notice I'd been away?? I was so busy preparing for the course I was teaching that I never got a moment to post before I left for Leicester and the Writing Romance: Beyond the Hearts and Flowers course this weekend.

I had a fabulous time. It's amazing the way that 12 people who have mostly never met before (14 if you include the tutors) can meet and 'gell' quite so fast that in a couple of days I felt as if we'd known each other for ages and that I'd made a whole bunch of new friends.

I knew it was going to be a good weekend, if only because I was teaching with my great friend Julie Cohen who I haven't seen in far too long and I was right about that. Julie is always wonderful company and as a co-tutor I doubt if I could have picked anyone better. But I wasn't prepared for was just how much fun the whole weekend was, from the first welcome cups of tea, through the teaching sessions, the meals, the evenings swapping ghost stories in the bar (and being told to be quiet because we were laughing too much!) the critique sessions , the Writing Sex class where the poor man asked to bring us in a heater (this was another cold WET summer weekend) fled rapidly as soon as Julie told him what we were doing . . .

It was one of the best courses I've ever been involved in and that was down to those 12 people who made up the class. So, in no particular order -

Liz , Jo , Jacqui , Lara, Melanie, Pat, Karen, Sue, Gray, Jane, Sarah, Marie it was wonderful to meet you

And of course Julie - Thank you all for a fabulous time.
And thanks to Sally and Bonnie from Arts Training Central for organising everything and for all the photocoyping!

Now I have to catch up - again ! The Great Big Blog Party is over (sniff!) but I have plenty to do. I still have some winners to announce and, looking at the last Party Post, I have some questions to answer that will give me some material for the next couple of blog posts.

And of course I have THE DEADLINE . . . .So I'm going to be busy.
Oh, and there's one thins I should mention.

Recently I've had a flurry of emails asking about the internet story Stolen By The Sheikh that was the result of the Writing Round Robin that I did on eHarlequin last year. This story is linked to the later book At The Sheikh's Command and the two cewntral charaters of S B T S appear in that book at the end.

This story was available as a special ebook mini on eHarlequin and then it disappeared. Because so many people were asking about it, I checked with eHarlequin and to my delight they have reinstated this ebook - and what's more it's available for free! So if you're one of the readers who wants to get you hands on this story, you can find it here to read absolutely free.