Great Old Friends

Don’t you just love old friends? You know the ones you have had since primary school or high school. The ones you may not see for six months or more but are immediately back to where you left off as soon as you are together.

I had my friend from high school, Mandy, stay for the weekend. We have been 'besties' since we were 12. We haven’t seen each other for such a long time due to the complete craziness of life, but that just doesn’t matter.

We had such a fun weekend. We walked to the Byron Bay lighthouse. We walked my cute cavoodle down our pretty country lane to the view of Lennox Head. We walked to Newrybar, our local village (6km round trip) to have coffee and croissants. Yes, we love a good walk. We also love to run, but Mandy hurt her knee, so walking it was this weekend.

One of the wonderful things about Mandy is she can cook. Really cook. Nearly every time she comes Mandy will cook dinner. This time it was prawn risotto. OMG, it was so good. My contribution was lighting a fire and pouring the wine.

Do you have friends like that? The ones you don’t see for an age but as soon as you are together, it is as if no time at all has passed.

In Sickness and in Health

Well, this post was going to be all about my experience of the fourth Australian Romance Readers Convention which was held by ARRA at the QT Canberra over the weekend. I was due to attend and be part of the book-signing and on a panel titled, A Rich Man's World. The panel included Melanie Scott, Sofia Tate, and Sylvia Day and was chaired by Kat Mayo from bookthingo. How great would that have been?

Alas, best laid plans…

I got sick. Very sick. Probably the sickest I’ve ever been.  Over a week in bed. Hooray. Just what the doctor ordered. 

You know how you dream sometimes about how wonderful it would be to spend a week in bed reading, watching movies and generally veging out? Well, turns out it becomes really boring after about five minutes. It certainly was for me. I’m a woman of action and lying around nearly drove me insane. And I was too sick to do any actual work, so very unproductive all around.

But, I’m on the mend now. In fact I have to get better as I’m doing a bookshop signing at my local book store, Mary Ryan’s, this coming Thursday. I’ve got together with women’s fiction author, Lisa Walker and the fabulous and hilarious Mandy Nolan. We will be chatting about writing, books and love.

Lisa recently launched her new book Arkie's Pilgrimage to the Next Big Thing. I’ve nearly finished Lisa’s brilliant story and it is such a great read. Kerry Goldsworthy from the Sydney Morning Herald said:

“This is a funny, charming and thoughtful kind of chick lit, full of witty one-liners and intriguing minor characters, realistic about the vicissitudes of love and desire.”

Mandy’s book Boyfriends We've All Had (and Shouldn't Have) is laugh-out-loud funny. I read it last year before I appeared with Mandy and my fellow LoveCat, Amy Andrews at the Byron Bay Writers Festival. Wasn’t that a blast, Amy?

If you are in Byron Bay on Thursday, 12 March at 5.30pm, drop into Mary Ryan’s for a fun night! I’d love to see you there.

So, have you ever been sick and missed something you’ve really been looking forward to?

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Stop Press:  Tempted by the Billionaire Tycoon is currently on sale for just $1.99. Buy it now at Amazon,  iTunes, Google and other retailers.

Find out more at www.jenniferstgeorge.com

Choose Your Own Adventure

I have some exciting news. I've been invited to join some NY Times best-selling and award-winning authors including Isobelle Carmody, Sean Williams, Sophie Masson on a new interactive storytelling project that aims to culturally enrich cities around the world via real life Choose Your Own Adventure stories. 

It’s a mix of cultural tourism and storybook adventure, I jumped at the chance to bring such an exciting project to my home town. My story would of course be a romance. There are lots of very romantic locations Byron Bay.

The producer Emily Craven has gathered together a dozen award-winning authors, each with a world-wide fanbase and published in over a dozen countries, to write Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style stories in cities across the world. Each adventure is written specifically to highlight the beautiful and intriguing parts of a specific city and to appeal to a young, tech savvy traveller.

The international project creates a completely new way of telling a story, by dropping the reader physically in the middle of it. Rather than reading the choose-your-own-adventure in printed book form, this project is creating maps so adventurers can read the story in the location the adventure is happening. Each map has a series of QR codes that a reader can scan with their smart phone. Each code links them to a webpage where they can read the next part of the adventure and then choose from several options to continue the story. Each new part of the story takes place in one of the locations on the map, showcasing the landmarks of some of the world’s most trendiest cities in a whole new way. Each story happens in a specific city. Other stories are being set in Prague, Paris, New York, Toronto and more.

Not only are we trying to create real adventures, but we’re going to lead you to the hidden nooks and secret features of Byron and other cities around the world, taking you on a journey you would never find in a guide book. At the same time you could be avoiding an alien invasion, solving a mystery, surviving a zombie apocalypse, falling in love… Hey, anything can happen on an adventure…

Not only is the project unusual but so is the method of funding it. To get this project off the ground, Emily has organised crowdfunding. Crowdfunding involves raising funds from the public, via ‘pledging’ to support the project start-up costs. In return, the ‘pledgers’ get rewards for contributing to the project, with different rewards for various levels of contribution ranging from maps, to books to, private conversations with authors, to actually having a character in one of the adventures being named after you! You can pledge for just $5.

The crowdfunding campaign finishes on the 4th of October 2013. If you would like to find out more about the Choose-Your-Adventure project, see the crowdfunding page. There's a video that explains everything!

If you could Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, which destination would you like to explore during your adventure?