Below is a photograph of me with my friends at the Romantic Novelists conference in Penrith. I'm Liz to just about everybody now, unless you knew me when I was a little girl when my mother called me Elizabeth. My husband called me Beth.
Anyway, here we are at the big dinner on the Saturday night on the Penrith campus and I wanted to start like this because one of the best things my writing has given me is good friends.
Immediately to my right is Catherine King, then Joan Emory, Freda Lightfoot, Leah Fleming and Trisha Ashley. We had been outside in the courtyard at the back of the building, sitting around in the early summer evening, drinking wine and talking to lots of other people We have been friends for many years and I have lots of happy memories of us all together.
I'm sixty this year, it feels very strange. In the last thirty years I have had thirty nine novels published, so the next, which comes out in August will also be a big milestone. My first book was published in 1981 three weeks before my daughter was born. I wrote for Robert Hale then, six short historicals, fourteen Rainbow Romances, six long sagas for Hodder and Stoughton and up to now thirteen sagas for Severn House. My fortieth novel is called Snow Hall.
