Back to the beginning

For years I have been whimpering about blogging and how it’s too difficult for me to do, but I gave myself a stern talking to while I was in Australia, and this is the result: Jessica Hart on blogger, and I am UPDATING IT MYSELF!!!! Everyone else can do it, so why not me, right? Well, we’ll see. The idea is that if I do the blog myself, I ought to be able to update it more often. And I guess we’ll see about that, too.  So this is me going back to the beginning and starting again on the blog front with a BETTER ATTITUDE. 


For now, I’m desperately trying to finish the book I, er, didn’t get round to finishing before I went to Australia (oh, the shame of a missed deadline!) but there’s a lot of other stuff happening too. Most exciting of which is Harlequin Mills & Boon’s New Voices competition which launches on 6 September.

If you’d like to write a romance and haven’t yet heard about New Voices, check out the website here (ooh, I can do links!) And actually, there's a nice segue here about beginnings, because the first round is to submit a first chapter.  A shortlist of ten aspiring authors will be selected by Mills & Boon's judging panel to go through  to the next round. At that point, they’ll be assigned to a mentoring team of an editor and author to work on their second chapter together, which will also be judged, and four will go through to the final round, writing a 'pivotal moment' scene before a final winner is selected.

I’m going to be one of the author mentors, so am really looking forward to getting involved and helping my ‘mentees’ (is that a word?) through to the next round. So polish up your first chapters, and maybe we’ll be working together!


As this is my very first blog, I'm going to see if this works, and if it does, I'll be back with my top tips for writing that first chapter ...