Today’s a big day in the romance writing community – it’s the announcements of the finalists in the Romance Writers of America Golden Heart Awards for unpublished manuscripts, and RITA awards for published manuscripts.

Members of the RWA Board have the very pleasant task of contacting the finalists by phone to notify them, although its such a thundering honour to final, that they probably get ear damage from all the squeeing! The calls are supposed to start at about 8am on Thursday morning, US time – but since that’s the wee small hours Australian time, some of the board members phone Australian finalists early, while we’re still awake on our side of the world – although the finalists are supposed to keep it to themselves until the ‘official’ calling time begins.

Before I went to bed last night, there were already a few unofficial announcements on Australian loops, and I was thrilled to see two friends are RITA finalists, and to hear of at least three Golden Heart finalists. Australians are usually well-represented in the finalist lists, and this year is looking good, too!

Of course, I’d been hoping for the phone to ring all afternoon, as Dark Country was entered in the RITAs. But alas, it stayed silent. It was a slim chance, I knew, and I hadn’t been holding my breath. So I went to bed about 11pm, but lay awake for a while, finally drifting off at about midnight.

The phone woke me at 12.22am. And it wasn’t someone from Gordon’s work with a network breakdown. It was a lovely lady from RWAmerica, to tell me that Dark Country is a finalist in the romantic suspense category of the RITAs!

It’s now 1.30am, and I’m still grinning from ear to ear, and unlikely to go back to sleep for a while!

I’ll put up a full list of Australian RITA and GH finalists later today, when they’re all announced.

ETA: The full lists of finalists are now on the RWAmerica website – RITA Finalists and Golden Heart Finalists.

Super congrats to all the finalists in both awards! And special congratulations to the Australian finalists: in the RITAs, Elizabeth Rolls, and Kelly Hunter; and in the Golden Heart, Kylie Griffin, Vanessa Barneveld, Gabrielly Luthy, and Robyn Enlund.

That’s three Australians (including me) in the RITAs and four in the Golden Heart – what a great showing, Australia!

I’m still working away on First Light, the third in the loosely-linked Dungirri series. However, given my health dramas, and the timeframes required by publishing, after discussions with my publisher and my agent, we have made the decision to reschedule the publication date from September this year to April, 2011.

I know that’s going to be a little disappointing for some of you wonderful readers, but we felt that a good book, published a little later, was far, far better than a rushed book published earlier. And, since I have to have another medical procedure in late March, it does save us all from the risk of trying to fit revisions and copy-edits around recovery time! Hopefully the procedure will go wonderfully well and only involve a couple of nights in hospital, and I’ll be able to get right back into polishing First Light, but there is a risk of complications, so, while I’m a little disappointed about the publishing delay, I’m also relieved, too, as it lifts most of the pressure and stress.

Once First Light is finished and in, I’ll be able to get going on the next series! I’m currently not letting myself think too much about it, because I don’t want to get distracted from Dungirri, but the fun of creating a new community and new characters will I hope lessen the sadness of saying farewell to Dungirri. But before I leap into the new series, I might just polish up a couple of Dungirri short story ideas that have been floating in my head for a while – and perhaps those will make the wait for First Light a little easier!

There’s some great books coming out in March! First up, in good news for my overseas readers, the UK edition of Dark Country is officially released on 4th March. It’s available from the Book Depository – in a weird Book Depository thing, you can pre-order it from bookdepository.com at the current special price of $6.66 (AUD), or you can pre-order from bookdepository.co.uk for $10.31 (AUD). I know, it doesn’t make sense, but neither place charges shipping so either way it’s a great deal. (Of course, I have no idea how they actually make any money…)

If Australian readers have already read Dark Country, then keep an eye out for Helene Young’s Border Watch, which will be released here in March. I’ve been lucky enough to read a proof copy of this, and it’s a great read – suspense, romance, planes, and the far North Queensland land & seascapes. Congratulations, Helene, on a fantastic debut novel!

Back in 2008, when I went to the RWAmerica conference in San Francisco, I had the absolute pleasure of meeting writer and knitter Rachael Herron. Rachael took me and a couple of other knitting writers around some SF yarn shops, and a great day was had by all of us. A day or so later, at the conference itself, I bumped into Rachael in the coffee queue, and so we sat together and had a great chat before she headed off for a pitch appointment with an editor. Now, I can’t remember which editor she pitched to then, but not long afterwards a very sensible one offered her a publishing contract – and Rachael’s first book will be published in March, in both the US and here in Australia. However, in one of those quirks of publishing and marketing, in the US it’s titled ‘How to Knit a Love Song’ – and in Australia it’s called ‘Eliza’s Gift’.

So, there you going – some great reading for March!

(And there’s more coming up in April, but I’ll leave that for another post…)

I’ve never been a morning person. Some people wake up with the first light, energised, alert, and eager to face the day. That’s not me. Something deep in my brain is wired for night-time, rather than early morning, and my instinct, when the alarm goes off in the morning, is to snuggle deeper under the quilt, close my eyes, and drift off again.

But I do get up early sometimes, and once I’ve convinced the brain and the wanting-to-close eyes that it’s okay to actually be awake, I can almost enjoy early mornings. If I go outside, I love them.

This morning, I was out before sunrise. We woke about 5.30am; it was light outside, but the soft, pearly light before the sun is visible. I took the camera out. The frogs were croaking away quite loudly in the dam – we’ve had rain recently, and they’re still singing about that, with all their little froggy hearts. The air was still, and while it wasn’t exactly quiet, with the frogs singing and the choughs squawking amongst the trees, there was a sense of quiet, each sound distinct in the stillness.

Our place is surrounded by bush; at that time of morning, the trees are silhouetted against the sky. A patch of lighter sky, low on the eastern horizon, signals the coming sun.

To the west, the sky has a soft pink edge to it, reflecting the new light.

The sun breaks above the horizon of distant trees, and the light transforms from pink, through apricot, to gold:

..and its rays scatter through the trees, catching some of them in shafts of gold:

So, why, I hear you ask, did I get up early this morning? To take photos And why did I want to take photos? To put on my blog.

And why is today’s blog about the early morning?

Because it seemed like a good way to create an atmosphere for my readers, in which I can announce that my publisher and I have decided that the title for my third book in the Dungirri series will be: First Light.

I love the title. It fits well with the As Darkness Falls and Dark Country, and completes the arc, from the fall of night, through the darkness, to the fresh promise of a new day.

Now I just have to finish writing it…

I was wandering around the web yesterday and found that my German publisher, Blanvalet (a division of Random House) now has the details up on their website for the release of the German-language edition of As Darkness Falls – to be released in May, 2010, under the title Schwarze Dornen. The translator is Carsten Mayer.

The cover is quite striking, although very different from both the Australian and UK editions:

While the image isn’t directly related to events in the book, I think it does effectively create a sense of menace in conflict with the natural world, which does reflect some of the themes of the book. Plus, it does catch the eye, and will make the book stand out on the shelves and tempt a reader to pick it up – and that is what a cover image is supposed to do, so therefore I like it!

The title translates (I’m pretty sure) to ‘Black Thorns’. It’s not unusual for a foreign-language edition to have a different title; translation is not as simple as just replacing words with their equivalent ones in the other language. Sometimes there isn’t an equivalent word, and many factors are taken into account; the style of the writing, the sound and rhythm of words, their meanings and subtleties within the language, the culture and cultural references, and, of course, what will appeal to the book-buying public! Schwarze Dornen sounds strong, and is probably easily remembered, plus it evokes a sense of the atmosphere of the book, so I think it’s a good title for those reasons!