Busy busy

It's going to be a crazy couple of weeks  so if my blogging is a bit intermittent, that's why
I have  the Valentine's Day workshop in Brigg Lincolnshire  on - well, obviously  on Valentine's Day next week and then straight after that I'm travelling to Wales  for the Fishguard Writers' Weekend to teach Writing Romance for the wonderful residential weekend there. I love this weekend and am so looking forward to it.  We have a lot of fun, discuss writing, do some great writing exercises, drink a little wine . . .

And of course I have the small matter of a book to write myself. Health problems and family crises have interrupted my creative process viciously so I'm fighting to get back on track. I really think that the workshops and talking about writing and discussing the process will help with this so  if I'll be seeing you there, then you'll be  helping me as well as I'll be helping you!


And  - a special message for Maria for her comment  on my Tote Bags 'N' Blogs post on Sunday - you mentioned Girl About Town as the first M&B you found down the back of a sofa in 1975 -  and said you couldn't recall the author. Could  it be this one?

Don't you just love the diesmbodied heads and the 'sophisticated' hero  Sean  lighting up a cigarette - I mentione d that smoking was so much more common in thoese earlier books - I recall one where the hero was driving his sports car along some narrow, windy moutain road in Italy or somewhere  and he lit a cigarette as he drove along. And of course no one was wearing a seat belt then! 

Anyway, Maria if this is the book you remember - there is a single copy available on Amazon right now.

Oh - and  the 'oldie' of mine you mentioned - Bedded By The Greek Billionaire, that came out in 2008 and  sold out on the M&B site but is still available in ebook. It's also being reprinted in a Greek Affairs  collection coming up in May.

Anne Weale

I woke this morning to some sad news for the world of romance.

Anne Weale, who for fifty years wrote ground breaking romances for Mills & Boon, died on 24 October.

After selling short stories to a woman's magazine while still at school, Anne Weale became a newspaper reporter, the traditional training for a novelist. An enthusiastic traveller, she used authentic foreign backgrounds for her romances -- most famously, Antigua Kiss. She was, however, proudest of her "Longwarden" novels, Flora, All My Worldly Goods and Time & Chance which readers are still discovering in libraries and used book shops.From 1998-2004, Anne wrote a website review column, Bookworm on the Net, for The Bookseller, the UK's leading book trade press magazine.

Her first book, Winter is Past, was published in 1955, before I went to school. Her last,The Man from Madrid came out in 2002 and in between were almost 80 other titles, some short romances, some longer 'single title'fiction.

In May 2005, she started a book-blog at http://bookwormonthenet.blogspot.com/. Her work-in-progress is an autobiography called "88 Heroes…1 Mr Right" which now sadly will not be finished.

Anne Weale was a major force in English and international romantic fiction. She has a huge amount of knowledge and the publishing industry and was one of the novelists who was hugely successful in the days when Mills & Boon was run by Mr Charles Boon. I first met her at one of the earliest AMBA lunches that I ever went to where she was warm and welcoming and interested in a newcomer to the authors' ranks.

It's fairly well known that Anne and I didn't agree over everything. We had disagreements over the way that romance writing was going, and she would never agree with my interest in and encouragement of 'new writers'. But those disagreements led to interesting debates and assessments of the world of writing and publishing that are ineveitable as times change and I am glad that I encountered her lively - and occasionally acerbic mind in both written and verbal debate. A tiny, birdlike, elegant figure at AMBA lunches and HMB receptions, she had a grasp of life and an enthusiasm for living and learning that I admired hugely. She was the only elderly writer who could get away with calling the BM 'young man' and describing me as 'this girl'.

I always said that in many ways, Anne Weale was the person I wanted to be when I grew up.

Sometimes she irritated me, often she exasperated me, but she also taught me a lot, made me look at my own opinions and stand up for them. And she was writing in the genre I love when I was a very small child, making her way in the world of journalism and publishing at a time when women had a far harder fight to do so than anything I have ever encountered.

She was a woman and a writer to admire. A major name in romance publishing.I am truly glad to have known her.

And I shall miss her very much.

Her family have asked for no letters but I hope they find some of the tributes that appear on the web like this one and the one on Liz Fielding's blog.