'Snap Gapping' our way to the end of 2014...

I’m sooooo late catching up on November's post because I've been ‘snap gapping’ again – this time to the Kingdom of Bahrain in the Arabian Gulf.

Glasgow to Bahrain via Dubai

Trav and I went to Bahrain to visit and stay with a couple of dear friends who live and work over there, so we were in fact, tourists by default. Bahrain is a country that hadn’t actually been on our radar as a holiday destination but it really is a well worth a visit if you have a penchant for fascinating, cosmopolitan, and multi-cultural locations that are as rich in heritage as they are in fun and excitement. It has to be noted there has been and still is some political unrest on the island but at no time did we feel unsafe. On the contrary, we felt at ease everywhere we went by day or by night, as the Bahraini people are so friendly and welcoming.

Our lovely friends Sue and Pete took us out and about for the ten days we were there and what a privilege that was for us – the country is vibrant and booming. Some days we ventured far into the hot white sands of the desert. On other days, we immersed ourselves in the Bahraini café culture and drank Arabian coffee and ate succulent dates (never in equal numbers – you can have one or three, for example, but never two or four). In the evenings, we ventured into the city and to hotels like The Soffitel or The Ritz Carlton for decadent sundowner cocktail and a delicious dinner.

Sundowners over The Persian Gulf

We traveled from Glasgow International to Bahrain via Dubai with Emirate Airlines. You can sign up for an Emirates air miles loyalty card and news of flash sale prices on the Emirates website. As you can see there were heavy grey skies over Glasgow as we left!

Grey skies over Glasgow!

Highlights of our Bahrain Trip: Top of the list! Catching up with our lovely friends Sue and Pete!

Visiting The Tree of Life - in the shimmering white sand of the Bahraini desert stands an isolated and very old mesquite tree. Its girth is broad and its branches are wide and dipped with the effort of holding up its green foliage. Some of the branches are now artificially supported to prevent them snapping. Local lore dates the tree in millenniums but a study was conduced in 1986 in conjunction with by the Smithsonian Natural History Museum of Washington DC, USA, and it was then concluded that the tree had been planted in c1583 AD during the Late Islamic Stage. But the really interesting thing about this tree - is that to this day its source of water remains a mystery. Some believe the tree gets water from an underground spring but that doesn’t explain the complete lack of any other trees or green vegetation in the vicinity. I loved the journey out into the desert, passing working oil rigs and desert settlements and I particularly loved the sight of this lonely old tree on its unique hillside desert setting.

In the desert to see The Tree of Life and count oil wells!

Amwaj – the floating city. The Amwaj Islands project is an artificial island development in Muharraq, Bahrain. Known as The Floating City - it is still partly under construction but has a shopping mall, restaurants, hotels, waterfront villas and chalets and apartments - all intertwined with a series of canals, enabling residents to park their boats by their own back garden. There is also a white sand beach where we paddled while also admiring the skyline of Manama in the distance. The island project is beautiful, ambitious and totally incredible.

Amwaj - the floating city

Here I am at the marina in Amwaj Bahrain

Bridging the International Gap. The King Fahad Causeway links Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and is one of the world’s longest bridges between two countries. You need a visa to enter Saudi Arabia but you can drive to the midpoint on the causeway and enjoying the glorious view across both countries.

The road to Saudi Arabia

Grand Prix International Circuit: Bahrain is famous for its F1 venue. Tens of thousands of visitors attend each April. Here I am standing in the vast sand car park outside the stadium!

At the F1 Grand Prix Circuit in Bahrain - the flags, the grand driveway and the hot sand car park! 

Shopping: There is a certain freedom that exists in Bahrain that attracts many shoppers from neighbouring Gulf States. We (mostly) window shopped in many of the air-conditioned malls which have lots of familiar western outlets like Marks and Spencer. In the Souks, we browsed in and out of exotic perfume shops amongst rich and heavenly fragrances with prices that made your eyes water.

Traditional Arabian clothes and Marks and Spencer!

Sue and I at The Mall

Nights Out! In the evenings, we either socialised with the ex-pat set at the Bahrain Football and Rugby Club or watched incredible sunsets while sipping cocktails on balmy terraces that overlooked the sea. It was fabulous and exotic.

Ladies night at The Ritz Carlton Bahrain

I’ve just written up a full ‘Snap Gap’ travel report on Bahrain for Loveahappyending Lifestyle Magazine which, if you’d like to read more about Bahrain as a travel destination and more of my recommended sights, you can read it by clicking HERE.

I’ve agreed to write several more of these types of travel reports for LLm throughout 2015 and it was while planning which locations to feature in the magazine that I came to realise that Trav and I have been fortunate to have visited 32 different countries over the years – and some on several occasions. These include: The United Kingdom, The United Arab Emirates, Antigua, Aruba, Barbados, Bahrain, St. Barths, Bonaire, St.Eustatius and Saba, Curacao, Cyprus, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Spain, France, Grenada, Greece, Honduras, Israel, Italy, South Korea, St. Lucia, Monaco, St. Martin, Martinique, Mauritius, Maldives, Turkey, United States, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, British Virgin Islands.

You can create your own world travel map using this website: http://matadornetwork.com/travel-map

December Update: During December we also ‘Snap Gapped’ from Glasgow Prestwick to Tenerife. We flew with Ryanair and rented an apartment for a week. While Trav was away on a diving course with AmarillaDivers I was working on the edits for ‘Castaway in the Caribbean’. It was wonderful- and at the same time rather strange – to go from 4 degrees C to 24 degrees C in just over four hours of the flight time. From these photos you can see that it wasn't all work! We are back in Scotland just now for Christmas and so I want to wish you a very happy Christmas and best wishes for the new year.

Tenerife in December - sunshine, writing, having fun and catching up with friends

I’ll be back before the year end with a round up of 2014 – the writing and the travelling - and to share with you our hopes and plans for 2015 and to hear about yours. See you then my lovely friends!

Love, Janice xx

January - packing up and moving on!

I know, I know…. I haven’t posted since wishing you a happy Christmas but I do have a good excuse, honest! 

Just before Christmas we sold our cottage. We’d had it up for sale for almost a year but with the house market being in the doldrums, we hadn’t attracted any serious interest. That all changed very quickly indeed just before Christmas after a lovely couple came to view, loved it, and offered to buy it straight away!

You may wonder why we would want to sell our cottage, which we bought as a derelict shepherd's bothy twenty five years ago and renovated ourselves. Well, with our three lovely sons all grown up and seeing the big wide world as theirs for the taking, Mr JH and I have decided to sell up/downscale and age disgracefully by having some adventures of our own rather than putting our feet up by the fire.

We did manage to have a fabulous last family Christmas at the cottage. But the moment January arrived we were in packing mode. So now we have packed up and moved out - our exciting adventure has begun. We have very luckily managed to find a place to stay temporarily, until we decide where we’d like to base ourselves. We have moved from our cottage in the hills to a lodge house down by the side of the river. The river is one of the best in Scotland for fishing salmon and river trout and I must admit that I do love the sight and sound of the water thundering past us - from a safe distance of course - here on the river bank!

And the writing? Well, I’m just about to start writing a new full length novel for publication later this year and I can do that just about anywhere – same goes for blogging – so if I’m not here as much as you’d like me to be with my news then please do pop over and Like my Page or Follow me on Facebook or Twitter as you’ll find me online there most days and I’d be delighted to chat and share news.

So what’s happening this week…?

Award winning 'Innovative' Loveahappyending Lifestyle Magazine - for which I am an associate editor – has a fabulous third issue available now to read online or to download. I like to download it to read on my Kindle Fire in full colour. Find out how to get your FREE copy HERE

January 25^th is Burns Night here in Scotland and it is celebrated all over the world. I’m celebrating by offering my bestselling novel Bagpipes and Bullshot at a specially reduced price in paperback. Or you can download to Kindle at £1.90 or $3.00. A wee bargain!

Here’s the links if you’d like to check it out on Amazon UK or Amazon US. Other countries worldwide via Amazon are included in this offer.

You can win a copy of Bagpipes and Bullshot if you are my 5000^th Twitter Follower! I'm close to 5K lovely follower peeps and feeling so excited about reaching such a milestone! A copy of my bestselling novel Bagpipes & Bullshot goes to Follower No.5000!

Be a Tweetheart and Follow me on Twitter! https://twitter.com/JaniceHorton

Until next week then…..

Janice xx

Happy St Andrew’s Day…!

Join the party over at Loveahappyending Lifestyle Magazine website today!

Over fifty million people around the globe claim Scottish decent and so on the 30^th November - St Andrew’s Day and Scotland’s national day - it’s a day to celebrate everything Scottish!

 

Discover your inner Scot with my fun lifestyle feature over at Loveahappyending Lifestyle Magazine where you can Test your knowledge of Scotland’s Heritage by taking the Ultimate Scottish Quiz. In the Scots Language Test you can find out if you really know your Sleekit from your Sonsie! Then you can Kilt up and claim your tartan! Plus there are tips on appreciating your perfect dram and some exciting St Andrew’s Day recipes!

Finally, look the part with a Satire ‘selfie’..!

 

 

 So click here to haste ye over there…!

 

The Festival of Romance - fun and celebration!

I could have floated back to Scotland on a cloud of bliss after this weekend at The Festival of Romance instead of taking an Easyjet flight. This event, held annually in Bedford England, was three days of excitement and celebration amongst romance authors, readers, and industry professionals.
 

It was fantastic to meet up again with those peeps I already know and to finally meet those I feel I already know so well online but hadn’t yet met face to face. It might appear weird to throw yourself into the arms of people you’ve never met in real life and practically hug the life out of them – yet it felt complete appropriate to do so when these are people I already loved!

I was in contact with lovely JB of Brook Cottage Books before and during my journey to Bedford, as I was flying in from Glasgow to London Luton and she was flying in from Belfast. She sent me a photo so I’d recognise her when we finally met – and this is us just mere seconds after we did!
 

 

Ditto lovely Carol ‘Dizzy C’ (pic below) of Dizzy C's Little Book Blog, the wonderful Kim the Bookworm and fabulous Heidi of ‘Cosmochicklitian’
 

On the Friday night, Linn B Halton, Mandy Baggot and Sheryl Browne and I went to a fabulous Bedford Italian Restaurant for fun, wine and pizza!
 

 

Then at the Saturday night Gala Dinner, just when I thought the festival was only about being amongst fabulous friends, it also became a celebration of our success - when Linn B Halton, Editor in Chief of the emagazine with which I'm an associate editor - was awarded the 2013 Festival of Romance 'Innovation in Romantic Fiction' Industry award for “evolving the loveahappyending.com author/reader initiative into an interactive lifestyle magazine”.

 

 

After receiving her award, Linn said: “Being nominated was a huge honour, but to actually win the award was overwhelming. As organiser of LLm I was thrilled to accept this on behalf of everyone involved. There are thirty-two contributors in total involved with LLm and it is the wide range of articles (including book reviews) that saw our hit counter tip over the 3 million mark a couple of days ago, and we are now at a staggering 3,045,639.”
 

 

Huge congratulations to all the winners of all awards at this year's Festival of Romance and thanks to event organiser Kate Allan for all her hard work - what a fabulous weekend!

Innovation in Romantic Fiction Author winner – Linn B Halton with some of the Loveahappyending Lifestyle Magazine team

  

 

Left to right: Carol, Heidi, JB, Linn, Mandy, Sheryl, & myself

Festival of Romance - and Loveahappyending Lifestyle!

HUGE CONGRATULATIONS TO THE LOVEAHAPPYENDING TEAM!

 

LLm Editor in Chief, our own Linn B Halton has been shortlisted for the Innovation in Romantic Fiction (Author) award for evolving the loveahappyending.com author/reader initiative into an interactive lifestyle magazine.

 

Linn B Halton



 

And Carol Wright from Dizzy C's Little Book Blog, JB Johnston from Brook Cottage Books and Tanya Farrell from After the Final Chapters, all in the Loveahappyending Review Team have been nominated for Best Romance Blogger!

 

CONGRATULATIONS AND WELL DONE LADIES!

 Click here for the full announcement

 

8th to 10th November in Bedford

 

 

Festival of Romance 2013

The Festival of Romance celebrates romantic fiction in all its forms and gives readers a chance to meet favourite and new authors as well as taking part in lots of fun events and parties.

It is the UK's ONLY convention dedicated to romantic fiction.

You can book tickets online for all the Festival events.

Check out what's on and see which of your favourite authors are attending.

See you at the Festival of Romance!

 

Friday... again?

I’ve had my head down all week catching up on all sorts of things – so much so that I could not believe today was Friday – again.

I’ve been busy writing 1000 words a day of ‘Voodoo Child’ and I must admit that so far I’m having a ball with this stage of Nola’s life. This is a follow on novella to ‘How Do You Voodoo?’ and ‘Voodoo Wedding’ and in it Nola and Louis are expecting their first child. Of course, this time next week, I could be wailing and moaning that it’s all a load of junk but so far I’m having a lot of fun and the writing is going well. My editor is expecting to edit this book at the beginning of October and I’m planning a publication date of around 31st October. Wish me luck!

I’ve also been working hard on behalf of Loveahappyending Lifestyle Magazine, for which I edit the Bookshelf Reviews feature.  After attracting over two and a half million hits on our website we now want to give our visitors even more reason to return to us day after day. We are planning to grow the website again in the Autumn and hope to publish the very best articles in a high quality downloadable emagazine. Our features will include everything from interior design to recipes, but the ‘heart’ of our project will still be book reviews for our own featured authors in our Bookshelf Reviews feature.

 

 

 

I’m currently looking for one or two more book blogger reviewers to join us at Loveahappyending Lifestyle magazine and so if you love reading and have a book blog and are interested in applying please get in touch with me directly at janice@janicehortonwriter.co.uk.

 

I’ve been out and about promoting my latest title this week too – a with a mini book tour for ‘How To Party Online’ and you can read my guest spot at: Talli Roland’s Blog, Brook Cottage Books, Dizzy C’s Little Book Blog for online party advice and top tips!

 

 

Haste ye back here next Friday

In the meantime, be my friend on Facebook for regular writerly news and/or be a tweetheart and follow my daily authorly updates on Twitter at @JaniceHorton

Trending - and not just on Twitter...!

Grow Your Own is trending - not just on Twitter - but on my Scottish Country Lifestyle feature in Loveahappyending Lifestyle Magazine this week.

 

 

 

If you haven’t discovered LLm yet then you are in for a treat with the wide range of articles on lifestyle and entertainment regularly on offer and written by an international cast of guest writers. You can, if you wish, sign up for the newsletter to get a digest straight into your inbox but very soon, due to its amazing popularity, the magazine will also be available as a downloadable quarterly PDF for your tablet and e-reader. How fab is that…!!?

 

      Click here to read my latest LLm Scottish Country Lifestyle article   

 

I’m thrilled to announce that the winner of my Bagpipes & Bullshot completion is Bouncin’ Barb, who left the correct answer in a comment on the 18^th June. Bullshot is indeed an alcoholic cocktail similar to a Bloody Mary! Bouncin’ Barb wins a Kindle copy of Bagpipes & Bullshot so, Barb, do please get in touch with me via a DM on Twitter @JaniceHorton or via email at janice@janicehortonwriter.co.uk and I’ll send it out to you pronto!

Meanwhile, party peeps, you might be interested to know that I’m still busily making plans for the online party I’m hosting to officially launch my non-fiction book ‘How To Party Online’ - and I promise to have news, a date, and links for you next Friday on that!

 

So haste ye back here next Friday!

Talking Chickens – chick-lit…?

I’ve got my first of three ‘Scottish Country Lifestyle’ features going out with Loveahappyending Lifestyle magazine today – an innovative new online mag that covers some fabulous aspects of life and living.

 

In this feature I’m talking about keeping chickens and there are some photos of my ‘girls’ including this ‘free range’ photo of Kylie on the hill behind our cottage. This is the link if you’d like to pop over and take a peek!

Loveahappyending Lifestyle magazine

Haste Ye Over There…!

Author Showcase - Nicky Wells

Today I’m hosting fabulous friend and fellow Loveahappyending Lifestyle author Nicky Wells, as part of her launch tour for Sophie’s Run, the second book in her trilogy featuring the rock star and the girl next door.

Hi! My name is Nicky Wells, and I am the author of the Rock Star Romance Trilogy. It’s my great pleasure being here on Janice’s fabulous blog and to give you a peek inside my character’s rock star lifestyle, you see I’ve brought them with me, Dan the rock star and Sophie the girl next door. Or rather, I’ve brought you a little glimpse behind the scenes at one of Dan’s recent gigs in Edinburgh. Are you ready to rock and roll?

The truth, and nothing but the bare naked truth?

 

Now this is a really special treat for you; it’s actually an out-take and this scene isn’t in any of the books. BUT there is mischief, innuendo and more in Sophie’s Run, so go on, join Sophie and Dan on their adventures on this second leg of their journey!

Sophie: *enters the Green Room, skids to a halt, mouth hanging open incredulously* What are you doing?

Dan: *flashes her a smile* I’m getting dressed for the gig. *twirls*

Sophie: I can see that but… what are you wearing?

Dan: *takes a careful bow* A kilt.

Sophie: A kilt?

Dan: A kilt. It’s kinda obvious, don’t you think? *twirls again*

Sophie: *giggles* But… why?

Dan: When in Edinburgh, do as the Edinburghians… the Scots do, right?

Sophie: *waggles her head doubtfully* Don’t you have to be at least part Scottish to wear a kilt, legitimately, like?

Dan: *frowns* What’s the problem? Don’t you like it?

Sophie: I do. I do. You’ve got fine knobbly knees and all that. It’s just…

Dan: What?

Sophie: *shrugs and remains silent*

Dan: What?

Sophie: Well… you do a lot of dancing and jumping in your shows. I must make sure I get to be in the front row tonight.

Dan: *frowns some more* Why?

Sophie: *rolls her eyes* Go on then, do me an air guitar solo of… of… White Poison.

Dan: *obligingly pretends to play the guitar, takes giant leaps around the room* Duurrrr-durrrrr-dur-dur-durrrr-roooinnnng

Sophie: I knew it, I knew it! *chases Dan around the room, trying to get a peek* You’re going commando under there, you are, you so are.

Dan: *screeches to a halt* OMG, is that what got you so excited?

Sophie: Why, of course. I’ve always wanted to know.

Dan: You know wrong.

Sophie: *lifts corner of kilt, then recoils as Dan swats at her hand; steps away, singing* I am so right, I am so right, and there is nothing under there but the bare naked truth…

Dan: Wrrraaaggh! *chases Sophie around the Green Room* Come here you Sassenach wench, I’ll show yer the bare naked truth!

Sophie: *stops abruptly so that Dan crashes into her, swiftly wraps her arms around him* Now then, is that a promise or a threat…?

 

 

About Nicky Wells: Romance that Rocks Your World!

Rock On! Nicky Wells writes fun and glamorous contemporary romance featuring a rock star and the girl next door.  A signed author with U.S. publisher, Sapphire Star Publishing, Nicky is in the throes of publishing her Rock Star Romance Trilogy. Nicky loves rock music, dancing, and eating lobsters.  When she’s not writing, Nicky is a wife, mother, and occasional teaching assistant.

Originally born in Germany, Nicky moved to the United Kingdom in 1993, and currently lives in Lincoln with her husband and their two boys. In a previous professional life, Nicky worked as a researcher and project manager for an international Human Resources research firm based in London and Washington, D.C.

 

Visit Nicky on her blog where you can find articles, interviews, radio interviews and, of course, an ongoing update on her work in progress. You can also follow Nicky on Twitter and find her on Facebook. Nicky is a featured author on the innovative reader/author project, loveahappyending.com and has joined the Romantic Novelists’ Association. Nicky also has author pages at Sapphire Star Publishing, Amazon and, of course, Goodreads.