Dream a Little Dream

By Anna Campbell

As most of our Bandita Buddies know, September is a huge month in the lair. Three Banditas have books hitting the shelves. Christine Wells follows up her sublime SCANDAL'S DAUGHTER with the sparkling and sexy THE DANGEROUS DUKE. Tawny Weber, who is an astonishingly good writer, has her third Blaze romance out, RISQUE BUSINESS. Trish Milburn sees her debut book, A FIREFIGHTER IN THE FAMILY, out from Harlequin American. Can't wait to read this - although Amazon don't seem to be hear me yelling at them to send the &&%%% thing pronto! Then next month, Aunty Cindy's THE WILD SIGHT is on sale. It's garnering some great buzz, including a starred review from Publishers Weekly.

That's an amazing achievement and I hope you'll all rush to your nearest bookstore and pick up these books! By the way, we can save you that trouble - if you click on the covers here, you go straight to Amazon. Can't get much easier, can it?

But what's even more amazing is that when all the Banditas met as finalists in the 2006 Golden Heart Award, NONE of us had sold a book. Since then eleven of us have been published! And I'd lay money (and you people know I'm not a bettin' woman unless it's a sure thing) that there will be more good news in the pipeline before we're done.

So when we all got together, one thing united us (apart from the Golden Heart contest!). We all had a dream. We all wanted to be published writers. A substantial proportion of us (more than half which is well over the odds!) have now achieved that particular dream in a little over two years. The other as-yet-unpublished Banditas are working hard and purposefully towards that goal and I know will achieve it before too long.

I'm sure if you asked the published Banditas, we'd all say that we still have dreams. To make the New York Times list. Or to win a RITA. Or to have a movie made of one of our stories. Or even, for those waiting for their first book to hit the stands, to get that first magical bit of fanmail which tells them that their characters and stories have become real to someone they've never met, who perhaps lives half a world away.

One of my dreams sounds a bit silly unless you've spent your life drooling over romance novels. I wanted a stepback! That's the cover art you get INSIDE the cover of a romance novel. And guess what? With my January release TEMPT THE DEVIL, I get a stepback. This is it here, the couple staring into each other's eyes with smoldering passion as they pose half-dressed on a rainy clifftop (as you do!).

Oh, and just to keep the heat quotient up, this is the cover for TEMPT THE DEVIL. I'm hoping this handsome young fellow will take your fancy in a bookstore near you in a couple of months. It's a gloriously brooding, sexy picture, isn't it? I adored my gothic covers with their clinches but I think this one is really going to grab readers' attention.
Anyway, congratulations to all the Banditas seeing their oeuvres in the stores this month! You're all brilliantly talented women and it's an honor to be associated with you.

And what about you? Do you have a dream? Is it a pipe dream (like Jeanne's three wishes blog this week) or is it something you can see yourself turning into reality? Have you achieved a long-held dream? What was it? How did that feel? What did you do to attain your dream? Let's talk about dreams before I start dreaming of Jeanne! Oh, and just before I forget, CONGRATULATIONS, BANDITAS WITH NEW BOOKS!
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