The RNA Winter Party - a week to celebrate!

This is me at the RNA winter party. It may look as though I'm smiling but in fact I am grimacing due to the ridiculous height of my heels! In fact, from the moment I arrived I was unable move from this spot and had to wait for people to come to me (a bit like the queen) for fear of toppling into someone if I worked the room. I seem to remember the same thing happening at my first party (there's a picture  of them in a post about it called 'I Went to the RNA Winter Party... Well Done ME!' which you can read here).

It was  a lovely evening, especially as I got to meet Viv Brown (who writes as Vivian Hampshire). It's always great to meet another magazine writer in 'real life' and we had lots to chat about as Viv has also been writing a novel alongside her short stories.

Talking of novels, it was due to the other two people in the photo, Natalie Kleinman and Elaine Roberts, that I even have a novel. At last year's winter party I went as a guest, not as a member, and I have these lovely ladies to thank for persuading me to join the RNA New Writers' Scheme which in turn made me get on with writing my book. It was certainly nice to be there this year as a novelist as well as a magazine writer.

I'd show you all my  wonderful photos if only  I'd remembered to take any! This one is courtesy of Francesca Capaldi Burgess... thanks, Francesca!

I had this great plan that during the evening I would make sure that I would stalk chat to some lovely agents and plug tell them about my amazing debut novel. When it came to it, though, the room was so packed and loud that even if I had managed to collar introduce myself to one of them, we would have been shouting and using sign language. I did manage to have a chat with Rebecca Lloyd from Accent Press though (who I'd had a one-to-one with at the conference). It was nice to see her again and she was very happy to answer some of my (probably rather naive) questions.

My biggest disappointment of the evening was not being able to meet up with half the people I wanted to. In fact, some people I didn't even see or saw so briefly that all I could say was a quick hello. I can probably blame my shoes again for that! Still, as someone said to me - there's always next year.

Now that's the the RNA party covered but what is it I'm celebrating I hear you ask. Well, it's two things really. The first is that I have a story in both The People's Friend weekly and the Christmas special.

... and the second is that since I started my blog three years ago it has had 150,000 pageviews WHOOP!