A Labour of Love

It is the Romantic Novelists Association's Awards Event on Monday 5th March, with nibbles and bubbly and the announcement of the RoNAs, the RNA's awards announcing the best romantic novels of the year.  There is a category for the outstanding love story of the year, the RoNA Rose, for category romance and the shorter romantic novel, that focuses on the developing love story between the hero and heroine, and I am thrilled that my book, The Dangerous Lord Darrington is one of the six titles shortlisted for the RoNA Rose.  The list is impressive, with some really good, established authors here, so I decided I would read them all (no real hardship, after all, in fact it is a labour of love)

I started with Liz Fielding's Flirting with Italian, a beautiful, contemporary love story set in Italy. I couldn't put it down and it had me reaching for the holiday brochures. Next it was Jessica Hart's Ordinary Girl in a Tiara, a very topical story of the girl who falls in love with a prince – or is he a frog?  This story is charming, funny and poignant, and I found myself rooting for the characters right up to the end.

I followed these with Mary Nichols' Winning the War Hero's Heart, a Regency romance with a twist – the heroine is a working woman and the hero is, well, a wounded war hero.  It is set in 1816, the year without a summer, and my goodness do those poor characters have some wet weather to put up with!  A lovely, warm romance that also has its more serious moments, but with all the loose ends nicely tied up at the finish.

I have just finished Kate Hardy's A Christmas Knight – a medical romance that definitely requires a box of tissues close by. I fell in love with the hero immediately and when the heroine is a kind, warm-hearted working mum and a generous nurse who is so good with her patients, how could you not want her to be happy?

The final book is Jan Jones' The Kydd Inheritance, another historical romance.  I am still waiting for that one to arrive, but having read other works by this author I know I am in for a real swashbuckling romantic adventure .

So, I shall be there on Monday, and I hope to see the other five authors there, too. And for me, it doesn't really matter who wins, surely just to be shortlisted amongst such august company is enough. Well, it is for me, although, of course I shall be keeping my fingers crossed……

Sarah Mallory

Ostrich Feathers and Scented Candles

Last week was quite a week.

On Monday, I went up to London to attend the RNA’s Romantic Novel of the Year Lunch which took place on Tuesday at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington. It was a great event and thoroughly enjoyable for everyone who was there.

In spite of the weather and the travel difficulties, the room was full and buzzing with excitement. Last year, the tables had been decorated with balloons and streamers, straining for the ceiling. This year, there were scented candles floating lazily in large glass bowls, and arrangements of red and black ostrich feathers in matt black candelabra, looking like exotic head-dresses at some rather off-beat ball.

There were video screens, too, where we saw the covers of all the short-listed books and heard their titles and stories as we waited for the moment when the winners were announced. First, the winner of the Romance Prize — India Grey, for Mistress: Hired for the Billionaire’s Pleasure. Then, the winner of the Romantic Novel of the Year — Julia Gregson, for East of the Sun. You can see the winning authors, and read more about them, and the other finalists, on the RNA’s website here.

The RNA — which celebrates its 50th birthday in 2010 — has also inaugurated a Lifetime Achievement Award. The first recipient of the engraved star trophy was Judy Piatkus, a publisher who really believes in romantic fiction, and who gave many RNA members their start in publishing. If the audience’s reaction was anything to go by, her award was hugely popular.

Many historical authors were at the lunch. Among others, I saw Louise Allen, Anne Herries, Carol Townend, Mary Nichols, and Elizabeth Bailey, who also does a fantastic job as the RNA’s volunteer press officer. If you’ve seen newspaper articles about the award, raising the profile of romantic fiction, Liz probably had a hand in them.

And when I eventually arrived home, late on Wednesday, a box of author copies was waiting for me — the US edition of His Reluctant Mistress, which will be published in North America in April and in the UK in June. I will admit to having taken some out and stroked them. It doesn’t matter how many books I write, it’s still a thrill to receive real, printed copies and to know that the book will actually be out there for readers, I hope, to enjoy.

Joanna
http://www.joannamaitland.com

Guest blogger - Mary Nichols

We'd like to welcome Mary Nichols to the blog, talking about her new book, The Earl and the Hoyden.



Hello, and thank you for inviting me to the blog!

Miss Charlotte Cartwright is incredibly wealthy and incredibly stubborn. She cannot forget that Roland Temple rejected her six years before, calling her a hoyden, even if he has since become the new Earl of Amerleigh and is highly eligible; let the other young hopefuls battle it out for him, for she will not. Her fight with him is over a strip of land and a lead mine to which both lay claim and until that is resolved, they cannot move forward. And Roland needs that mine. He has come back from the wars, older and wiser, to find his father dead and the estate in a parlous condition. It is going to take all his energy and resources to set it to rights and the fiery Miss Cartwright can only be a distraction…



The inspiration for this book came from a visit I made to the Snailbeach Mine in Shropshire, now a museum, although I have used author's license to site it further north than it really is. There was a time when the lead mines of Shropshire were the most productive in Europe. Mining in the area goes back to Roman times, though it would have been extracted from shallow workings. When ores close to the surface became exhausted, greater depths were explored and some of them became very deep indeed.

Mining was a hard and hazardous occupation. By the light of a candle attached to their helmets, the miners worked in gangs, usually two experienced miners, a labourer for heavy shovelling and a boy whose job it was to take the ore to the bottom of the shaft. One miner held the drill while the other hammered it into the rock and the ensuing holes were packed with explosive. Once the explosive had loosened the rock, the ore was lifted to the surface via shafts and taken in wagons to the crusher house where it was prepared for smelting by women and children working in terrible conditions. Understandably, there were frequent accidents: from flooding, from rock falls and cables breaking on the cables that lowered the men to the rock face. In spite of steam powered pumping engines to deal with the water and compressors to help with the drilling, by 1885 the competition from cheap imported ore sent the prices tumbling and many of the mines were forced to close.

This might seem a strange background for a romantic novel, but romance can be found everywhere and in my hero and heroine I have two stubborn characters who come to realise that pride comes before a fall, and fall they do, in love with each other! You can see a review of this book at http://cataromance.com/?p=1407

Thank you, Mary, the book sounds fascinating!