TIMING IS ALL?

Last weekend, as many of you will know, was the RNA annual conference. This year, it was at Chichester, in the south of England, near Brighton. Of course, as a Regency novelist, I should have been off to the Brighton Pavilion, but in fact there were much better things to do, and I didn’t leave the campus. We had a wonderful, and thoroughly inspiring weekend, as ever. There was time to catch up with old friends over the odd drink in the bar, there were amazing talks and workshops to start the creative juices flowing (as Fenella has already mentioned), and there were books everywhere. What more could a writer want?

In my case, what I wanted were copies of my own new book, His Cavalry Lady, the first of The Aikenhead Honours Trilogy. Sadly, I didn’t have them. They’re not published until September, so it was asking a lot to have my own copies at the beginning of July. All I was able to do was to display a copy of the hardcover version, so that delegates could see what the cover would look like when it was available in the shops.

I came home from the conference on Monday, driving part of the way through blinding rain, and sat down with a cup of tea. I’m afraid I then fell asleep. Obviously, I must have been working exceptionally hard all weekend or that would never have happened, would it?

And on Tuesday morning, the postman rang the bell to deliver — yes, you’ve guessed it — a box of copies of His Cavalry Lady. I’m running a competition on our newsletter for a signed copy of it and I can now promise that the winner will receive her prize as soon as the draw is made at the end of the month.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to read an extract of His Cavalry Lady, you can find it on my website here.


Joanna

http://www.joannamaitland.com/