RWA conference & Destiny Launch

I've been away at the Romance Writers' of Australia conference, and I thought I'd share some photos. It was held in the QT hotel on the Gold Coast, so while it's cold wintry weather where I live, on the Gold Coast it was warm and balmy. This was the view most days from my room. Nice, eh?

And since it's the east coast of Australia, each morning we woke to bright sunshine streaming in the window. A couple of mornings I even woke at dawn and snapped a few pictures of the rising sun.

It was a busy conference for me, even though I'm no longer involved in any organizational work. On the Thursday we had Author Day — for published authors only — and a very informative day it was indeed. The first panel was on self-e-publishing, and that was brilliant. After that was a presentation by Louise Sherwin-Stark on Google hangouts and . . . all I can say is expect more of these hangouts from me in the future. I did one on the Saturday following with Eloisa James and Christina Brooke and some others and it was fun, even though I was battling with server problems and kept dropping out. I'll write more about it in a day or so — I'm limiting my time on this — need to be working on a book. See the hangout here.

In the afternoon, Penguin Australia organized all their authors for cover photos, with hair and makeup professionally done. That was equal parts of traumatic and hilarious — I am not photogenic! Some people were also interviewed for the Destiny website (see below)

On Thursday evening we launched the new romance digital-first line for Penguin Australia, Destiny. It was a brilliant launch, with pink champagne and strawberries, and yummy nibbles, and a few brief speeches, and then the four launch authors and I read a 2 minute excerpt from our stories. It was lovely — you could have heard a pin drop in the crowded bar.

Here are the launch titles. I've read the first one—Wish—and it's fabulous.

 And then they gave us each a beautiful bunch of flowers! How nice was that?

A friend of mine came up afterward to congratulate us (a famous author whose initials are AC) and she  SAT ON my bunch of flowers! Right plop on top of them!  

I shrieked and shoved her off them and . . . amazingly the flowers survived. LOL.

And why was I up there? I'm not a launch author, but my Scottish story "The Laird's Vow" will be given away free with the launch titles in the first month of launching. 

Here are all the Destiny authors who were at the launch, along with Sarah Fairhall and Carol George from Penguin Australia, the commissioning editors.

Thanks Penguin, for a brilliant launch.

Tomorrow I'll put up some pics of the cocktail party, which is always a mad dress-up affair. The conference theme was Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend, and there was a 50's theme for the cocktail party, and it was all huge fun.