My First RNA Conference and an Award

I’ve just returned from my first ever Romantic Novelists’ Association (RNA) Conference and my head is still in a complete whirl. I feel enthused, energised, educated and exhausted!

It was a hurricane of informative sessions on How to be Happy as a Writer, How to Write 19K Words in a Weekend, Marketing, Author Branding, Synopsis Secrets and much more. Sarah, Duchess of York and successful romance author, Marguerite Kaye were there to talk about how they write collaboratively – unfortunately I couldn’t make that session but I was told that it was brilliant.

All of the above was interspersed with meeting lots of new people, catching up with the few I already knew and meeting, in the flesh for the first time, some of the other Choc Lit (an imprint of Joffe Books) authors.

The weekend had three stand out highlights for me:

Firstly, the chance to meet up with Emma and Jasmine, Editorial Director and Project Editor respectively from my publisher, Joffe Books. We were taken out to to a swish bar off the College Campus and given wine!

Secondly, the terrific atmosphere at the Saturday night Disco. The dance floor was full of women (& a tiny handful of men!) all night. Who knew romance writers were such party animals?! The DJ looked on in a very bemused way.

Thirdly, the announcement that I was the winner of the Elizabeth Goudge Award for my one thousand word opening for a novel on the theme: Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder. Nobody can have been more shocked than me!
My award made the evening a full house of awards for Joffe Books because another of their writers, Katy Turner, won the Joan Hessayon Award for New Writers with her novel, Let’s Just Be Friends. This award is for authors whose novels have been through the RNA’s New Writers’ Scheme and are subsequently accepted for publication.

I now need to go and lie down in a darkened room to get over my ‘conference lag’.