One of the things I am trying to do at the moment, now that the book has gone (for a while at least) is to tackle the many boxes I still haven’t unpacked. They’re mostly books, and the difficulty for me is that I need to cull them. I gave away two very large bookshelves when I moved, and had some new bookshelves built in, but there’s still not enough space, so it’s culling, culling, culling for me. Not fun.

Anyway, the focus at the moment is setting up my office. I don’t really need an office to work in anymore, as I write on my laptop, which can go anywhere. But when a friend visited and we were looking at my office-to-be she said, “What are they?” and pointed at a line of acrylic writing trophies I have won.  

In my old house, the office walls were painted a deep mid-blue — the paint company called it “budgerigar blue” and the acrylic trophies stood out quite well against it. But in the new house all the walls are a kind of white, and the trophies become invisible. When I explained she shook her head, and said “These are things to be proud of. You need to display them properly.” And I am very proud of them. They are mostly from ARRA (Australian Romance Readers Association) and reader awards, are, in my opinion a real honour.   (Note, I’m using Australian spelling, so our instead of or.)

“Stick something colored behind them,” my friend said, so seizing on any distraction, I did. I bought some shiny card, and we cut out shapes to fit behind the trophies and stuck them on the back of the trophies with sticky tape, so the writing was readable. 
So here they are.  The blue ones are for “Favourite Historical Romance”, the red ones are for “Favourite Australian Romance Author” and the two light green ones are for “Favourite Continuing Romance Series.” And there’s one RWAustralia RBY as well. I’ve won that three times, but the first two were wooden and metal  plaques and didn’t need anything.

So now that’s done, I need to crack on with actually setting up the office.