Congratulations & Photo

First thing today is to congratulate the Top  28  - the writers who have been chosen to go into the next stage of the So You Think  You Can Write contest.   This is a real achievement for all of you  - so Congratulations! I hope that this success spurs you on to greater things - I'll look forward to seeing the results of the next stage when they are revealed.

If you haven't see the list, then you can find it here.

Good luck to the long list 'winners' - but really, the hard work starts now. It;s one thing to create a first chapter, polish it and submit it and win the attention of the editors/reader voters - quite another to craft it into a full length, fully developed and readable story.   Go for it!

Those who have not been selected - this is not the end. I'm sure that more than the 28 long listers will have been noticed - and I hope that having taken the plunge and written something  you will not give up now. Remember, getting published is a marathon, not a sprint - keep on  keeping on and hopefully there will be many newly published authors from this contest.

Photo - I expect you'll be seeing lots of these all over the web in the last few days - When the authors all met for the annual Association of Mills & Boon lunch, back in September, Harlequin provided a photographer to take photos of everyone there  so a s to provide a new publicity photograph for author pages etc.  We all received our copies of the new photos last week and as I said many authors have been posting them on their web sites, blogs etc.   So if you've always wondered what a favourite author looks like you'll find them around the web.

And if you want to know what  mine looks like - well, here  you are. 

The Babe Magnet likes it, so does The Offspring and even Flora and Charlie think it looks like Mum!