RWNZ Conference - online registration

You can now register online to attend the annual RWNZ conference in Auckland (August 2012). You can come for the whole three days (Friday to Sunday), or choose one or two days that best suit you. Hey, and if you choose Sunday, you can attend my workshop How To Write Sex....

Chocolate and the Titanic

I loved reading the first class dinner menu for that last dinner on the Titanic....

Romance a la Jane Porter

For a less steamy, more thinking-girls' type of romance, look no further than Jane Porter's excellent books. Particularly if you're a sucker for a semi-true love story, and like surfer boy hotties, read FLIRTING WITH FORTY.

Happy Easter!

Easter special: buy Eve Summers' DANCE LIKE EVERYONE'S WATCHING and let me know. I'll throw in another Eve Summers title of your choice for free.

The Journey From The Golden Puma

THE GOLDEN PUMA is a bit of an icon in the world of romance books. Published in the early 1980s, The man is ultra rich and ultra rude, the woman doesn't have a job and spends her time struggling with her healthy sexual urges. She feels so guilty about her sexuality, she secretly welcomes the forceful way in which the hero imposes himself on her. Today, it would be called Date Rape.

I was going to write a post about how far we've come since then, about the intelligent and funny romance books by Jenny Crusie... alas, somebody beat me to it. Their article is brilliant. Read it.

What happens when we read fiction

This is a cool article about what happens in our brain when we read fiction (click here). In a nutshell, we actually experience what we read (we smell the vanilla cookies, we feel the cold, we imagine we're running on the beach). Books are like computer simulations of real life:

Fiction, Dr. Oatley notes, “is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.”

So, when you read a romantic novel, you learn to love better. And you get to experience the kisses. Right? :-)

Romantic Short Fiction - Chapter Short Story Competition

Just over a week left to send in your entries to the Chapter Short Story Competition. The entries have to be 1,500 words long and have romance at their core. Click here for more information.

This competition is sponsored by Chapter, a book café and tea shop located at 442 Mt Eden Rd in the Mt Eden Village, Auckland. It has the best loose-leaf tea, brownies and books in town!