Wildest dreams - RT Book Reviews Reviewers' Choice

Once a book is published - when it grows up and leaves home, it takes on a new life. It's making its own way now, in the world of readers and reviewers. All the writer can do is watch from the side lines. It is wonderful to hear that a reader enjoyed your book. That was what made you write it in the first place. Not so good if they didn't enjoy it, but everyone is entitled to their opinion. Good reviews make you happy, bad ones make you wince, sometimes particularly perceptive ones make you thoughtful. Getting awards, or being nominated for them, is the icing on the cake.

The Joan Hessayon trophy

I've been incredibly lucky with my debut novel, Never Coming Home. It's been nominated for a number of accolades and won a few. I'm immensely grateful to various reviewers and judges who liked it enough to put it forward. I can honestly say that every one of them has been a complete surprise.

And late on Wednesday night I had another surprise. The nominees and winners of the RT Book Reviews Magazine Reviewers Choice awards were announced. I clicked on a link to see if there was anyone there that I knew. There was - me. Along with Sharon Sala, Diana Layne, Joya Fields, Robin Covington and Teresa Hill I was a nominee in the Indie Press/Self Published Contemporary Romance category. I hadn't won, that honour went to Sharon Sala, but just to be nominated was a terrific thrill. Wildest dreams territory. In fact, so wild I e-mailed my publisher early next morning to check that I wasn't imagining things. I'm a writer - we do have vivid imaginations.

The reply came back promptly - yes it is you.

I'm going to be attending the Booklovers Convention organised by RT Magazine in Kansas City this year. To be going as one of their award nominees is a fabulous feeling.

Researching Austen in Bath

In a few weeks time I will be one of a party of Choc Lit authors attending the RT Booklovers' Convention in Kansas City. It's a huge event and it is going to be pretty hectic - talks, signings and panels. I'm going to be helping out on Sunday afternoon when Juliet Archer leads a session on Jane Austen. As Juliet is Choc Lit's Austen expert, re-imagining the books into modern settings, and I write contemporary romantic suspense, and am in no way an Austen expert, this might have resulted in me simply volunteering to hold her coat and mind her handbag while sitting, fascinated, along with the rest of the audience.

It still might.

But I thought I should make an effort at something I could do. I could visit Bath and look at some of the places that would have inspired Jane and influenced her writing. So I did. And took pictures. I'm still nowhere near being any kind of expert, but I hope I might be able to find one or two interesting remarks to make on the day. If not, I am reasonably adequate at holding coats and minding bags.

Two of Jane Austin's books are set in Bath - Northanger Abbey and Persuasion and there are references to the city in other books. As a spa town it was a popular place to visit in Jane's time - with shops, entertainment and the chance to 'take the waters' - to drink, or sometimes to bathe in, the waters of the thermal spring that were thought to have medicinal properties.

And as it happens the new novella which I am really going to finish very soon opens in Bath. So there is a connection. But it's not Jane Austen.

The Pump Room - where visitors would drink the water, and congregate to see and be seen. Now a posh restaurant with live music. 

The Abbey

Pulteney Bridge - lined with tiny shops . A bit like the Ponte Vechio?

Elegant Georgian houses

Great Pulteney Street 

Bath has some very fancy post boxes

Walcot Street

Trim Bridge - was the blanked window the result of the window tax?

I don't think these were cobbles as walked on by Jane, but you get the idea. I doubt they had yellow lines either.

A side street of smaller dwellings