Kelly Hunter giveaway winner

Congratulations to obsidiantears83, who won our giveaway of Red-Hot Renegade by Kelly Hunter. She chose Captain Thunderbolt as the renegade who would make a fantastic romance hero:

Captain Thunderbolt. Every time I drive through Uralla, in the New England ranges, I wonder what his life story was actually like, because it is so romanticsed. There is also Thunderbolt’s Boulder just outside town where he used to hide out. He was a horse theif and was arrested, did hard labour, and then his wife’s helped him escape. They became bushrangers and lived hard, mostly between the hunter valley and the new england.

Top 10 things romance oversells

Julie of Gypsy in my soul lists of some of the most unrealistic things we might encounter in romance. And she does it with love for the genre. Hilarious. (Source: @VaVeros)

Storms & magic: controlling the forces of…fiction

Details of Maria V. Snyder’s talk at Ultimo Library is up on the City of Sydney website. It’s on Wednesday, August 17 from 6pm. The event is free, but you need to contact the library to make a booking. Click here for more details. (Source: @VaVeros)

World Cafe Readers’ Evening at Ashfield Library

On Thursday night, Ashfield will be holding what sounds to me like a…library fete? Genre specialists will be talking about their areas of interest and there will be live performances. If you’re a Twitter regular, you might know Vassiliki (@VaVeros), and if you’re an SFF junkie, you might recognise Sofia from Galaxy Bookshop. The event starts at 7pm and goes for an hour. Click here for details (PDF).

NZ author Soraya Lane featured in Woman’s Weekly

Check out New Zealand Woman’s Weekly’s article on Mills & Boon author Soraya Lane: My Mills and Boon dream came true. (Source: @MillsandBoonAus)

Romance at Random

Random House has launched Romance at Random, a blog devoted to all things romance. Check out the guest posts written by various romance bloggers. They’re generating some very interesting discussions.

Gollancz to launch SF Gateway

Gollancz (the SFF imprint of Orion, which is owned by Hachette) is launching the SF Gateway, which will make out-of-print titles digitally available. The aim is to build up up a collection of up to 3000 ebooks by the end of next year and 5000 by 2014.  As Marc Aplin at Fantasy Faction points out: ‘If you read one book a week…it would take you over 96 years to read them all. So, Gollancz are effectively supplying you with a life time’s worth of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature; what could be more exciting than that?’ Indeed! You can read Hachette’s media release here (PDF), which includes a list of authors under contract so far.