get moving

I'm not giving anything away by letting on that the heroine in my latest book - RESCUING THE ROYAL RUNAWAY BRIDE - is a runaway bride ;). She literally jumps out of a ground floor window of a castle and runs across hill and dale in a pretty huge pink wedding dress in order to avoid marrying...well, a gorgeous prince, actually.  (But that's another story...)

I’ve never been a runner.  Or a jumper.  I have bad knees.  And low willpower when it comes to purposely inflicting discomfort upon myself. So apart from a strange aberration at the age of 10, I’ve never been a runner.  A lap swimmer.  Or a bicycler. Cyclist?  See I don’t’ even know the terminology.

The reason for my bad knees is years of dancing when I was a kid.  Because I looooove to dance.  In a club.  At a wedding.  Or in my kitchen with Bruno Mars slipping me some Uptown Funk.

I did Physical Culture (now Physie) for fifteen odd years.  I took Highland Dancing classes for three.  I was a gymnast (avoiding vault with everything I had, for its nothing but running and jumping and therefore the ultimate evil).

"Go Team Go!"

One of my first jobs was as a professional cheerleader. There was some jumping involved but the dance portion, and the pure fun, made up for it.  My team won a lot which helped.  And we got to travel – all the way to the USA one year.  So I coped.

Funnily, I never tried ballet until a couple of years ago - ballet slippers, legwarmers, the lot!  The flexibility and strength required, even from that first lesson, was mind-boggling.  It was truly hard. But those years of dance training as a kid stick so picking up the routines was doable.  And immensely satisfying.  My muscles thanked me for putting them through the wringer, even as they wept.

It's all about the outfit.

My favourite part of dancing was always the part where you stretch at the beginning and the end.  (The least runny/jumpy parts 😊.)

Imagine my state of pure bliss the first time I tried yoga.  Yoga is now my thing.  My bliss.  My time out.  My mental break.  No running.  No jumping.  Just lots of gorgeous stretching and stretching and more stretching. And then you get to lie down at the end for a really long time!

Yoga is the kind of purposeful infliction of discomfort I understand.  Not huffing and puffing and getting lactic acid itches in your legs and stitches in your side.  The kind where you feel your spine unfolding and your muscles sighing.  Where afterwards you feel an inch taller, and like you’re floating just a little off the ground.  Where you can feel oodles of sanctimony for having moved your body while at the same time sending “your positive energy out to your love ones and the whole world”!

Run as far and fast as you like, kids, no track coach will ever give you that 😉.

How about you?  What’s your favourite way to get moving? Do you love exercise or believe its the work of the devil?

(For those who are concerned about the fate of the gorgeous prince left at the altar by the runaway bride in RESCUING THE RUNAWAY BRIDE, do not fret!  He gets his own happy ever after in AMBER AND THE ROGUE PRINCE.)

royal wedding fever

(c) Kensington Palace twitter

Who here has royal wedding fever?!  Me!  Me!  Me!

Come midday (London time) this upcoming May 19th, I will be glued to my telly to catch Prince Harry marry his Meghan.

And oh the wonderings I have. What might The Dress look like?  How far will they stray from royal protocol?  Will Harry cry?

And it got me to thinking; what makes a royal wedding feel so darned special?

The idea for my latest Harlequin Romance book sparked from an image of a runaway bride in a huuuuge dress standing in the middle of a rain-soaked country lane. Mascara stained tears wavering down her cheeks, she swears and curses and growls at her shoe which has become stuck stuck in the mud.  When the hero comes driving around the corner in a nifty little sports car and nearly runs her down...

Fun meet cute, right?

But then, for some reason, I looked over her imaginary shoulder, back in the direction from where she'd run, to find - gasp! - an honest to goodness castle!  For - oh my! - the man she had left standing at the altar, so stoic and concerned and jilted was none other than a prince!

And suddenly a perfectly fine idea became so incandescent I might have swooned.

Because Prince! Castle! Tiaras! Not one Royal Wedding but two!

Okay...  Pausing a moment here to take a breathe...

Hearing news that anyone is getting married gives me happy chills. For a wedding is a lovely thing. And its not the dress, the cake, the pretty decor (though all that is nice too).  It's the fact that two people are so in love they wish to declare their feelings, their hopes, their determination to hang onto one another through thick and thin for the rest of their lives, to everyone they know and love.

Stick all that in a fairy tale castle and suddenly its more than a romantic heart can bear.

But you know what?  Even if the royal family announced the wedding was to take place by a swamp, at midnight, dress standard: hessian sacks, I'd be cheering them Harry and Meghan on.  Because royal or no, the best thing about Harry and Meghan's upcoming big day is Harry and Meghan. How in love, how determined, how hopeful they seem.

I wish them both as much happy as they can cram into their ever after.

Will you be watching?  Do you have high hopes for the adorable couple?  What do you think Meghan's dress will look like?  Or would you prefer to eat worms than hear another word about it ;)?

(For anyone who just can't wait, my Royals of Vallemont duet - Rescuing the Runaway Bride and Amber and the Rogue Prince - is out now the world over!  Head to my website for links. xxx)

A Peony Rose by Any Other Name...

All kinds of things can inspire a writer.  A snippet of overheard conversation, the note of a song, a flickering memory of a dream, a person’s name.

The series I’m writing right now, each story has found inspiration in a flower.

 

The first book is set in Vallemont - a make-believe principality in Europe somewhere.

Writing one day the Palace of Vallemont cast a rosy hue when the sun hit it just so. From this came the country’s official colours of pink and rose gold. A wedding is set to take place in the story.  Much excitement has gripped the land.  Peony petals are tossed in the air with abandon and now cover the village streets.

 

Yes, peonies.

Since my muse tossed them into the story in a seemingly random way, I have become obsessed.  Googling images till my vision turns dusty pink. Getting a little heart flutter every time my laptop turns on and the abundant loveliness of my peony wallpaper hits my eyes. Are they not the most soft, pretty, elegant, flower there is?  Lush (with all those softly curving petals) yet vulnerable too. Easily bruised.

 

They are now seriously nudging at gardenias (my wedding flower) for the number one spot in my exclusive list of favourites.

Now onto the next book in the series; set in the rural central coast of Australia. The first lines of the book my heroine stepped out of her shack and blinked sleepily towards the sunrise casting a misty glow over the acres of wild lavender carpeting the hillside.

 

Lavender. 

 

Not my favourite flower.  As someone with a strong sense of smell I struggle with lavender.  But oh, that field outside the heroine’s front door. When the wind creates waving tracks in the weave, it looks like a single living thing.  And my muse is a happy fellow.

 

These things aren’t often planned. Not for me. They happen organically.  Arriving like a speck of glitter thrown by my muse.

Yet that speck can inform so much of the story.

 

From the peony petals stomped into a mud puddle when the royal wedding doesn’t go as planned, to the heroine despairing that the field of lavender outside her front door will be lost if the land development goes ahead.

 

Those small details can give a story colour, life, scent, earthiness, grounding.

 

As for the author?  She gets to google pictures of pretty flowers and call it research.

 

Do you have a favourite flower?  Is there a story behind how it came to be so?



Who doesn't love a wedding?

Planning is underway for a family wedding in September and I vary between sentimental to freaked out to OMG I'm never going to lose any weight in time. And I'm not even doing the organising or the dressmaking! Probably just as well, LOL!

As a reader I always love the commitment that marriage, or the promise of marriage, brings to a relationship. I know a lot of people say it's only a piece of paper but to me it's more than that. The ceremony, the circumstance, the pledge to one another in front of family and friends--they're all very important to me and they are equally important to my characters, Prince Thierry of Sylvain and Princess Mila of Erminia, in the first of my Courtesan Brides duo, ARRANGED MARRIAGE, BEDROOM SECRETS.


Here's the blurb:

Princess Mila will safeguard her kingdom by marrying a neighbouring royal she barely knows. But she refuses to let Prince Thierry perfect his romantic arts with another woman. Disguised as his hired courtesan, the virgin princess plans to seduce her fiance before their wedding!

The mind blowing chemistry they discover can't be taught--or forgotten. Yet Mila's lie is unforgivable to a man like Thierry who prizes honour above all. Public scandal threatens all Mila's dreams and her country's future...unless this prince can let passion, and his heart, reign supreme.

I hope you'll look out for this book, scheduled for release in June 2016! You can preorder online now from your favourite Harlequin stockist. And please watch out for CONTRACT WEDDING, EXPECTANT BRIDE, Book 2 in the Courtesan Brides, which is coming out in August 2016.


I loved combining a royal theme with this arranged marriage story concept. It's almost like writing about another world all together. Expectations and lifestyles are so very different from those that we live in our day to day existence, don't you think? And because I made up the two kingdoms involved, it really was like writing a fairy tale at times (when I wasn't beating my head repeatedly against the keyboard and trying to wrangle these two very strong minded characters into existence.)

Are you a royal fan or a fan of weddings? Or do you prefer to read stories that are about people who live more mainstream lives. Let me know in the comments below! In the meantime, happy reading everyone!