'Dear Julia' makes a splash

My second 1920s historical romance, Dear Julia, launched today with a 'wave' across 8 blogs. You can surf the opening chapter of the book, starting at http://minxesofromance.blogspot.com.

Join the party, tweet your feedback using the hashtag #DearJulia, and there's a contest too: just answer one easy question to stand a chance to win a copy of Dear Julia on my Rae blog at http://raesummers.wordpress.com. Entries close Sunday night, and the winner will be announced on Monday.

About Dear Julia

Dear Julia is set in the English countryside in the early 1920s, and is part of the Love Letters series from The Wild Rose Press.

Read the opening extract here.

The discovery of a long-lost love letter in a house she’s redecorating sends Rosalie Stanton on a quest to find its rightful owner.

Since his return from the Great War, William Cavendish has lived as a recluse. His peaceful existence is shattered by the return of the letter that once held all his hopes — and by its bearer, the irrepressible Rosalie, who bears an uncanny resemblance to his lost love.

As Rosalie sets out to lure William back into society, she realises that in him she might just have met her match.

Dear Julia is on sale through Amazon, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble, All Romance eBooks, and direct from the publisher, The Wild Rose Press.

ROSA 2012 Writing Contest - Results

Congratulations to the winners  of  ROSA's  first writing competition.

Unpublished Entrants’ Category

 

Winner: 
“Accounting for Lust” by Ylette Pearson

1st Runner Up:  
“Dream Doctor” by Amanda Holly

2nd Runner Up: 
“Resisting the Enemy” by M-F Morrison

Published Entrants’ Category

Winner: 
 “The Untouchable” by Gina Rossi

1st Runner Up: 
“When September Ends” by Romy Sommer

2nd Runner Up: 
“Love in the Newsroom” by Pamela Kauffman

The ROSA contest closes at midnight tonight!

Happy Workers' Day to everyone in South Africa. I hope you've had a blissful long weekend!

The 2012 ROSA contest closes for submissions at midnight tonight, so if you haven't already entered, I hope you're spending the day working hard on polishing your submissions.

Just a few reminders:

• The contest is open to South African citizens and residents of South Africa only
• Only one entry per person please, as we don't want to overwhelm the judges
• Check here to confirm whether you should enter the Published or Unpublished category
• Entries should NOT have the entrant's name anywhere on the actual entry. Your cover email should contain the following information: full name/pseudonym, daytime contact number, email address, ID number and title of your entry.
• Entries should be formatted in Word or RTF format, ideally double-spaced and professionally presented.
• Full terms and conditions are available here
• Send your entries to contest@romancewriters.co.za

Thank you very much to our Contest Administrator, Clare Loffler, who is no doubt going to be very busy these next few days!

Good luck, everyone!

ROSA Contest Clarification

With just six days to go to the contest deadline, we'd like to clarify the one part of the contest Ts & Cs that sadly never got loaded onto the website.

You should enter the Published category if you have a novel or novella of more than 15,000 words contracted to a traditional publisher in either eBook or print format.

All other entrants should enter the Unpublished category. This includes authors who have self-published, or been published in short story form only.

One entry per author only please.

For formatting guidelines and all other Terms & Conditions, please click here, and if you still have a question that isn't answered here, feel free to leave your question in the comments section below.

Good luck to all entrants!

Our very own Rosalite: April Vine!

April is an erotic romance writer from the Cape, and an active member of the ROSA Yahoo group. We are so excited to be able to feature her latest release: Unbound, published by Ellora's Cave.


ABOUT APRIL VINE

April writes erotic romance by night and is a professional dreamer by day. She has two precious sons who keep her sharp and one very tolerant husband who chivalrously and bravely defends her honour daily.

ABOUT UNBOUND

Staid and straitlaced Michelle Stein has two thoughts fueling her mind…
1. Floor the first man to walk into her antique shop.
2. Throttle her three witch-practicing aunts.

They promised her a tiny spell to fix her ridiculous inhibitions, but instead mischievously delivered a full-blown, sanity-squashing lust spell. The temporary curse apparently has no boundaries either…since the first man who walks through her door is the same man who broke her heart ten years ago. Despite Michelle’s vociferous resistance, Sebastian becomes the only man who can appease her unending physical hunger.

Thirty, heirless and restless, Sebastian Gray is drawn back home to Cape Town to claim the only girl he ever loved. What he finds in her place is a hotly bewitched erotic seductress. Now with the reparation spell her aunts cast gone awry, Sebastian might be on the losing end of a futile battle against a strength-ascending hex, no matter how hard he tries to keep Michelle satiated, alive…or even just human.


EXCERPT

* NOTE: This excerpt contains erotic language *

Chapter One

Michelle leaped from the floral-embossed Victorian chair, gripped the edge of the walnut desk and dropped her chin to her chest. Labored breaths somersaulted from her mouth. Her heart beat with swift speed. Her skin screamed under a raging fire.
She was having an attack.
Not a panic attack.
A sex attack.
Oh how she vowed to strangle her aunts, wring their collective witches’ necks and put them on a diet of cabbage for as long as they lived. She thought they’d agreed with her terms and stipulations.
Obviously not, since they’d turned her into a raging sex fiend who without any hesitation would attack the first man who walked through the door of her antiquities shop. Not by her own doing, because how could she, twenty-six-year-old, staid, even-headed and collected Michelle Stein, sign up for such reckless sexual abandonment? Not ever.
She resisted the urge to squeeze her scorching ******* and the temptation to bunch up her cotton panties and pull them taut against her ****. She couldn’t give in. Not while her door remained opened for business.
She wobbled out of her office to the entrance of the store. Pressing her legs together, she chewed her lip in agony as the slightest movement ricocheted spasms of pleasure through her body. Her eyes fixed on the gold-plated sign hanging on the inside of the glass door meters away from her. Her mission to flip it around and keep out any possible victims until the crazy her aunts bestowed upon her evaporated.
Too late.
The door swung open. Eighteenth-century chimes hanging from the paneled ceiling danced in the afternoon breeze. Their former melodious jingle a sex-alert siren in her ear now.
She zeroed in on a musky scent mingled with the clean, self-assured aroma of pure red-blooded male. Her senses hummed. She licked her lips then swerved to a dead halt.
Bedeviled with the worst kind of heat known to any man, woman or animal for that matter, and who chose to walk into her ordinarily sedate but presently doggoned world?
Sebastian Gray.
He who broke her heart in two.
“Glitterbug.” His gravel-and-silk voice spiked and inebriated her nerves. She tore her gaze away from his killer smile and stared into his wicked green-tinged blue eyes, which teased her the same way they did ten years ago.
Only one thought shot through her mind.
Oh dear, I’m going to molest Sebastian Gray.

[This excerpt has been edited due to Blogger age restrictions, however for the full excerpt you can read more here]

You can chat with April online at her website, via email on april.vine@yahoo.com, on Facebook, or on Twitter. Or by joining the ROSA Yahoo group!  

Unbound is available from: 
Amazon
Amazon UK
All Romance eBooks
and direct from Ellora’s Cave

Great opening lines

Anthony Ehlers recently did a blog post on opening lines. It's an excellent post, so if you haven't yet read it, you should.

Taking Anthony's post a step further, I'm going to give examples today of great opening lines. Notice how each opening line conveys not only a sense of the author's writing style, but also what the book is about.

The first example is from one of my favourite authors, Georgette Heyer:

“A fox got in amongst the hens last night, and ravished our best layer,” remarked Miss Lanyon. 

- Georgette Heyer, Venetia (1958)

This sentence introduces the main character, the style of the dialogue gives an indication that this is a period piece, and best of all, hidden in these seemingly innocent words, lies the entire story: this book is about a rake's seduction of an innocent young woman.

If Uncle Lazarro hadn't left the mob, I probably wouldn't have a story to tell. 

 - Janice Thompson, Fools Rush In (2009) 

In one sentence you get that this book is going to be fun, probably a little tongue-in-cheek, and that it'll have something to do with both the mob and family. If this opening line piqued your interest, Fools Rush In is free on Amazon Kindle today.

There was a lot to be said for fictional fiancés, decided Charlotte Greenstone as she settled into the saggy vinyl hospital chair for yet another night-time vigil by her dying godmother’s side.

- Kelly Hunter, With This Fling (2011)

In just one sentence, we meet the heroine, set the scene, and receive a vital clue to what this book is about: this is a romance in which a fictional fiance becomes very real.

It is freezing, an extraordinary -18⁰C, and it’s snowing, and in the language which is no longer mine, the snow is qanik - big, almost weightless crystals falling in stacks and covering the ground with a layer of pulverised white frost. - Peter Hoeg, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1995) 

In an instant you not only know that snow and ice are going to feature heavily in this story, but that the storyteller is struggling with identity and her place in the world.
And isn't that language just beautiful? I've re-read this book twice and this opening makes me want to dig it out again.

And finally:

This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.” 

- The Princess Bride, William Goldman (1973)

Intriguing. How does a book become a favourite without the narrator having read it?
The reader is guaranteed to keep going to find the answer. This opening line also carries clues that this book is going to be all about stories and story-telling.

Re-read the opening lines of some of your favourite novels and try to spot the clues the author has given the reader of what is to come. Does that opening line convey what the author's voice sounds like in the rest of the novel? Can you guess the book's genre just from that opening line?

Now go back and read your own. Can you rewrite your opening sentence so that it works really hard to not only give as much detail as possible, but also to convey a sense of your style, and also to intrigue the reader to keep on reading?

Do you have a favourite line you'd like to share with us?

There are just twelve days left to the closing date of the ROSA Opening Scene contest. Click on the contest icon in the left sidebar for more information.

Opening scene checklist: what to do, and what not to do

The opening scene of any book is the most important.

Though you need to write a story that grips the reader to the very end, providing sufficient conflict and pace to keep the reader turning the pages, and an ending satisfying enough to make the reader want to read your next book, if you haven’t hooked that reader in the first few pages, all the rest will be wasted effort.

Your opening needs to accomplish several things:
• Introduce the main characters - this is perhaps the most important aspect of all, as readers need to care, and the only way they will care is if they identify with your central characters.
• What’s at stake? Hint at the central conflict and theme of the novel. Every scene, every page, must have conflict (Note: arguments are not conflict. Conflict is wanting something and not being able to get it). This opening scene needs to give the reader an idea of what the novel’s overall conflict will be.
• Set the tone of the story - is this a light and fluffy comedy, dark humour, intense and emotional? Let your natural voice shine through.
• Set the scene - where in the world is your story located? Give your reader enough description to picture the background, but don’t dwell on it. This is the moment to capture the reader with action and dialogue, not with lavish descriptions.
• Start the scene at a point of change. This is not the moment to have your hero or heroine in introspective mode, re-living the past, or waking up, getting dressed, brushing her teeth, making a cup of tea ... start with the moment she sits down in the chair across from her boss and gets told she’s fired.

What not to do:
• Do not bore the reader to tears with your character’s entire back story. That is for you to know and the reader to find out. Slowly, and in bite-size chunks.
• Do not start at such a high point that you cannot top it again for the rest of the novel. You’ll only leave your reader dissatisfied.
• Similarly, don't start in a dramatic style purely to capture the reader's interest, unless you intend to carry that style throughout the novel.
• Avoid stereo-typical beginnings: the alarm clock waking your main character, the car accident between hero and heroine. Aim for a unique and memorable opening.
• Do not forget to polish your scene to within an inch of its life, without losing your voice and uniqueness. Spelling, punctuation, and clear POV are important if you want to be taken seriously.

Our opening scene contest closes on 1st May 2012. For more information, click on the contest logo in the left sidebar.