F-F-F-Friday - Judging...

This is a non cooking post ... of course, it's F-F-F-Friday. It's also the day before I have to make 20 creme brulees for Christmas Day dessert but more on that in another post.

So, I've committed to doing something rather huge right now. Not something that I'm very good at ... this whole committing to something thing. I'm always rather careful when I commit to something because I want to make sure I follow through.

What is this that I've committed to, you ask?

Answer: I'm judging a writing contest. It's for the Romance Writers of Australia (RWA) Emerald contest.

I've committed to judging 5 manuscripts in Round 1 which is December / January, and then judging 5 or 7 (I can't remember which) manuscripts in Round 2 which is January / February. This, of course, is going to keep me quite busy and to be honest, I'm rather excited about the whole thing since I just love reading.

I also feel quite honored that they would allow me to judge their writing contest. I'm getting to see manuscripts of books written by authors before they get published. Who knows, there might be a gem that I discover that will become the next Nora Roberts or Julia Quinn.

I haven't actually started the reading of the manuscripts yet, although, today, I did get organized. I'm up in The House, so I've been installing Microsoft Office onto the new 'puter so that I can use the scoring sheets that I've been provided. I've actually got the manuscripts sitting right here on my desk staring at me saying "Read me! Read me!" I plan on getting started tomorrow and reading at least two of them and scoring them. I'm hoping to get through this lot for Round 1 before the New Year starts.

For those of you who can't tell from the list of books that I've recently read in the sidebar of this blog, I read a lot of romance. Recently, I've been particularly fond of reading paranormal romance. It's a phase I'm going through. Anyhow, it looks like I've been sent quite a variety in the romance sub-genre. There's paranormal (current favorite), historical (oldie but goodie), erotic romance (hawt!), a fantasy / futuristic one (spaceships and robots!) and one on time travel (please don't let this be another Highlander trapped in a time capsule!). This is going to be FUN!

I'm going to have some fun now and post some covers of an example of books that are in the romance sub-genre of the manuscripts that I'm judging. It's just going to be fun to look for the book covers.

Note: the following book covers are for books of PUBLISHED authors and all of them darn good!!

Paranormal Romance

Historical Romance

Erotic Romance

Futuristic Romance

Time Travel Romance

Some other random things happening in my world right now:

• We just installed Internet into The House. The House now feels less like a holiday home because I'm now CONNECTED!
• We have a brand new phone number to The House for above-mentioned Internet. This brand new number has not been given out to anyone. No one at all besides me and The Boy have this number. Have already received several scam calls on it from random Indian person asking to speak to the Windows Operating System User. I hung up.
• Christmas presents are all wrapped and Christmas letters sent. Presents did not exceed $50 per person (we're keeping it simple) and we sent out 125 letters. Postage costs a fortune!
• One Christmas letter went to Iceland. Another went to Germany. Those were the two most exotic countries on the Christmas letter list.
• I had a job interview yesterday, so the New Year may see me gainfully employed. Saying a prayer that I do get this job.

Well, tomorrow's Christmas Eve. I hope you have some fun things planned with family and loved ones. We're spending Christmas Eve with the best bud, his wife and his parents. We're going to gorge ourselves on food because the best bud being Italian, will OVER-feed us.

Christmas Day will see us with the parents and some relatives we haven't seen in donkey's years. It will be good to reconnect. I'm hoping the 20 creme brulees will go down well.

Then it's on to NYE, but I'm hoping to check in again before that. If I don't though ... have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.



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