It is a privilege to announce the winners of the 2011 Reviewers’ Choice Awards.  Congratulations to all the winners and much appreciation to all  authors for entertaining readers with your wonderful creations!    Click the links below to discover the RCA winners…

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The annual Reviewers’ Choice Awards will be announced on February 14th, a very appropriate day for romance, Valentine’s Day!!!  Be sure to see if your favorite book won this prestigious award.  Tell all your friends and congratulate all the fabulous authors.

I must admit the stress level has run high here at CataNetwork as reviewers worked to narrow down their choices.  It is very difficult because there are so many great authors to choose from.  So we want to tell all of you creative authors, you are greatly appreciated and deserve accolades galore and lots of chocolates!

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Award-winning author Liz Fielding chats to CataRomance about writing sixty fabulous romances for Harlequin Romance – and about her brand new novel, Flirting with Italian

It seems no time at all since I was celebrating the publication of my fiftieth book, but FLIRTING WITH ITALIAN is, amazingly, my sixtieth story for Harlequin Mills and Boon. It was published this December on the nineteenth anniversary of the publication of my first book.

Another project I’ve been working on this year has involved me looking back at those early books and wondering at the changes that have taken place in all our lives during that time.

Communication — the writers’ business — has been at the heart of it.

Mobile phones (I tried to imagine what my mother would have made of me standing in the supermarket and calling my daughter on the train to ask what kind of breakfast cereal she wanted). The internet, websites and blogs, email rather than letters, texting, Skype. They were science fiction for my generation, for whom Star Trek was a glimpse of the distant future.

Un milione di baci!

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It saddens me to have to announce this but beloved category author Penny Jordan died this past weekend. I only knew Penny online, through my work here at Cata but she was one of the kindest, sweetest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of emailing back and forth with. And she was a tremendous supporter of CataRomance.com. She will be greatly missed.

More info here.

~Ally

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When I was eleven, I was at a very small junior school that was in an old building, where the wiring wasn’t very reliable. This was in West Yorkshire where the weather was often wild, and storms could break over the hills with great drama and force. One day there was a huge thunderstorm, great flashes of lightning, and the lights in the whole building fused. We were sitting in darkness, with a lot of the girls getting scared and screaming when the thunder roared and the lightning flashed. (Not me – I have always loved storms and still do.)

To distract us from getting worried and while waiting for the electricity to be restored, the teacher – a Mr Grogan – told us to sit quietly and he would tell us a story. The story he told was about a man who returned home to his farm, high on the Yorkshire moors, bringing with him an orphan gypsy boy he found in the streets of Liverpool. The farmer already had a son and daughter, Hindley and Catherine – and the gypsy boy’s name was, of course, Heathcliff. This story was the beginning of the classic romantic novel – Wuthering Heights.

I never got to hear the end of the story that day because the lights came back on before my teacher had got past the point where Heathcliff and Cathy fight, and Heathcliff runs away to go and make his fortune. I never learned what happened when he came back – because it was obvious that he did come back – and I always wanted to know. The story stayed with me and I wanted to know so much about it. It was some years later that I found a book on my mother’s bookshelf and, opening it, saw the names I remembered so well. I started to read – and didn’t put it down until I had finished. It was an amazing story – but it never had the happy ending that I had hoped for. The happy ending I’d tried to make for it in my head and never quite managed to make it fit!

The idea for writing part of the mini-series The Powerful and The Pure based on classic books of romantic fiction was originally put to me by my editor. The mini-series was to take four of the great classics of romantic fiction and use them as inspiration for Modern Romances (Presents/Sexy) The Senior Editor wanted me to do Wuthering Heights – and I think I would have been terribly jealous of anyone else who got a chance to work on this one!

The other books and authors chosen were – Jane Eyre (Sharon Kendrick), Emma (Kate Hewitt), Pride and Prejudice (Cathy Williams). Iconic romantic stories that everyone who loves romance remembers – with heroines and specially with heroes that have set the ‘dark and devastating’ standard for all time to come.

Writing this particular book was fun and a challenge. In many ways Wuthering Heights was a problematic novel to work on as a romance writer. It’s not really a love story – it’s more a novel about passion and possession and power than a long-lasting love that would translate easily into the happy-ever-after ending romances promise their readers. It’s interesting that the real love story – that between younger Catherine and Hareton – seems so mild in comparison that in so many film adaptations it gets left out completely and yet this is a love of real strength that flowers in spite of the very rough ground it grows on.

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