Holy s***, it's me! Twice in one week even. I'm still in shock.
I spent an amazing weekend at the Romance Writers Conference at the start of August, culminating in a wonderful awards night where they gave me two(!) ribbons for winning the Great Beginnings Contest with City of Souls (Please make an author happy and pre-order the ebook if you're interested and haven't already).
I made heaps of new friends and had an absolute blast. Me and Amy Blythe (pictured) also unknowingly rocked a matching suit theme for our contest category at the Night at the Oscars themed event (check out that green velvet!).
Another recent awards night was the Children's and Young Adult book awards, which I didn't attend, but it was great to see speculative fiction winning out in the Junior (The Memory Thief by Leonie Agnew) and First Book (Spark Hunter by Sonya Wilson) categories.
And then, of course, there was the Sir Julius Vogel Awards! For a little while it was looking like they might not happen, but they did! I was a finalist in three categories and I won Best Short Story after being a finalist in that category four years running!!!!
Thank you so much to everyone who nominated and voted, and congratulation to all the winners and finalists! I was particularly excited for the wonderful Cassie Hart taking out Best Novel for Butcherbird, and Lani Wendt Young winning Best Youth Novel for Fire's Caress, a book in her Telesā world. Our Māori authors have been killing it in the speculative fiction world for years and I love that that is so visible in the awards this year.
If you haven't read my award-winning (omg) short story yet, you can find Data Migration here. And you can check out the full list of winners here.
