Romy Sommer

Today sees the start of a 5 day birthday bash at The Wild Rose Press as they celebrate their 5th birthday. Sadly, I'm away on holiday this week, so I won't be popping in, but I urge you to drop by their Yahoo reader loops to see what's happening. There will be lots of prizes for anyone who gets involved, including gift certificates. You can find the two reader loops here: The Wild Rose Press for romance readers The Wilder Roses for erotic romance Have fun, and I hope you all win lots of goodies (then you can buy my novella!)

Not the title of a new novel, but my state of being. Thanks to the changeable weather in Cape Town, and returning to a very wet and chilly Johannesburg, I now have a cold. Actually, it's not a very serious cold, except that my head feels ... well, full of cotton wool! While I dose myself full of Vicks Medinite and sleep it off, I'll leave you with a few images of one of our film locations from last week: the beach at Noordhoek, not unsurprisingly known as Long Beach. PS: Sadly I took no pictures of my own, so I owe thanks to Google Search for all these pictures.

Characters bring emotion to story, and emotion is what attaches readers to books. - Bob Mayer, Write It Forward

"There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking." - William James

I hit send yesterday evening and the partial of Beneath the Ionian Sun is now hopefully, finally, sitting in the editor's inbox. And not in her spam filter. Or email heaven. Or the hundred and one other places lost submissions go. Me, anxious?

I’ve been toiling away at polishing Chapters 2 and 3 of Beneath the Ionian Sun for what feels like weeks now, in anticipation of finally getting another submission out there. The reason for the toiling was because I just couldn’t get Chapter 3 to sparkle. This is the all-important end point the editor is going to read up to, so of course I want this chapter to end on a high note. Except that the sparkly dialogue and pivotal decision were sitting at the end of Chapter 2, and Chapter 3 was more of a bridging chapter. Re-write after re-write just hasn’t worked, so in pursuit of a solution I re-read the third chapters of all my favourite category novels. Without exception, every single one had a pivotal point in which the stakes were raised. It took me until just a few days ago to realise what I had to do: swap the chapters around. So simple! Why couldn’t I have figured that out weeks ago? Now I’ve cut and pasted sentences all over the place, rewritten so that the chapters flow ...

My parents gave me a gift in my early teens, a poster of a beautiful ballet dancer that hung on the back of my bedroom door for many years. Beneath the picture were these wise words from William Arthur Ward: If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it. I have no idea what happened to that poster, but those words will stay with me for life. This is my resolution for the new year, and my hope for all of you; that we will all dream big. But remember: you need to believe in the dream for it to come true.