Thanks and call story!

While I was having the busiest day ever yesterday and then sleeping, so many of you stopped by and left me gorgeous congratulations for my good news! and I want to thank you all. Loads of you have been my blog friends for a long time and you were the first people I wanted to share this awesome news with.

Aideen hinted in her comments that she might like a bit more of the ''story'' to how this came about, so I'm going to post the call story below that I just whipped up for the RWA Australia e-loop.

Thanks again to everyone! I love you all. xox

CALL STORY

I fell in love with category romance in 2006 when a writing friend of mine and I decided we weren’t getting anywhere with our proper writing and could easily write an M&B! I’d never read one in my life – hah!! I still recall my first read ever was Barbara Hannay’s “Having The Boss’s Babies’’ and I fell in love with category romance. Since that day on I targeted Mills & Boon not because I thought it was easy – hah – but because I genuinely loved reading it.

I had some success with contests and good, encouraging R’s from eds. Then in 2008 I came runner-up in the M&B Feel The Heat contest. This led me to working one-on-one with an editor and although they didn’t want the contest book, they asked for more. In early 2009 I started “The Maverick Millionaire’s Christmas Fairy”. This partial got a fabulous response from the ed but she didn’t think that it worked as a Christmas story.

Aiming to please I did revs on the partial and rewrote the story to take out the Christmas, boss/employee hook and big family elements. I was stoked when I got revs on the full! Surely THIS was FINALLY it. Alas, I just didn’t hit the sensuality levels for Modern Heat/Riva (which I was targeting). The eventual R was nice and said nothing about not nailing the conflict, characters, etc, which gave me hope. I went back to my original version – Christmas, big family, boss and employee – and subbed the one which I believe was truly MINE to Carina.

I was stoked to get a letter from Carina saying they liked the story and would like to read it again after revs. I did the revs and then my lovely mate Fiona Lowe offered to read it. Unfortunately she didn’t say “yay, this is fabulous” like I imagined (hoped) she would. She said, it’s absolutely great to chap five but everything past that needs to be rewritten. ARGH!!! I was moving house, buying a business, how was I to do this. But somehow I did. I got so sick of the story by the end of it but I sent it off and then got on with something else.

On April Fools Day I woke up to an email from Angela James offering to BUY MY BOOK! I am so happy that Carina want to publish the story that was MINE! And I hope that many of you will enjoy reading my debut – a Christmas story about fairy costumes, night terrors and a boss-employee mix-up that becomes their HEA...