BOOKS+PUBLISHING magazine asked me to write a brief article on upcoming romance fiction titles for their Shelf Talk section.

I talk about upcoming romance titles in the magazine’s first issue for 2013.

If you’re a fan of the Black Dagger Brotherhood, Psy-Changeling or True Blood/Sookie Stackhouse series, it’s going to be a great year of reading!

My first solo issue as Booktopia’s new romance newsletter editor.

I’m so excited to announce the first edition of the Romance Buzz that I put together all on my own! The Romance Buzz is the romance fiction newsletter put out by Booktopia, Australia’s largest online bookshop. My first featured author is Patricia Briggs–I know! How exciting, right? You can check out the March issue here.

For Valentine’s weekend, I was interviewed, along with Vassiliki Veros, for a radio segment on ‘Love and Passion’. You can download the podcast here.

This one is particularly poignant.

I used to sing Christmas carols with childhood friends around the neighbourhood, so this video made my heart ache a little. If you can’t see it, you can view it on YouTube. (For those who don’t understand Tagalog, the English part of the medley starts at 1:38.)

I wrote this for PINOYexpats, but this article was also the starting point for a similar piece that I submitted to the Australian Filipina magazine.

My extended family has produced some excellent cooks and my mum is one of the best. I, on the other hand, avoided the kitchen for as long as I could.

Cooking seemed to me a messy, laborious and thankless chore. When I moved out to an apartment with a brand new kitchen still gleaming in its stainless steel glory, I vowed to turn over a new leaf. Who better to experiment with than my new husband, who promised to do the washing up? Read the rest of this article.

This was the first article I wrote for PINOYexpats as part of the theme Buwan Ng Wika. It’s not the best thing I’ve ever written, but I’m so glad I finally found a copy so I can post it here.

A new immigrant, Lola was gardening when a neighbour greeted her with a jaunty, ‘Good day!’

‘Thank you,’ Lola replied as she fluffed up her hair.

Two weeks after arriving in Sydney, my family was at my school for an interview. ‘How was your flight?’ the principal kindly asked my parents.

‘Oh, we’re living at my sister-in-laws’ house,’ Mum replied.

It turns out that Lola thought the neighbour was admiring the colour of her hair dye, while Mum thought the school principal was asking her about our flat. When these stories are recounted to friends, we discover similar anecdotes around their first contact with colloquial Australian English – or what many people jokingly refer to as ‘Strine.

Language fluency is not just about the ability to remember words or put together grammatically correct sentences. Language is as much a cultural construct as it is a cognitive skill. The ‘English’ we learn back home sounds, feels and evolves differently to the ‘English’ of the Aussies, Kiwis, Poms and Yanks. Read the rest of this article.

Just a quick note to let you know that I have updated all my Australian Filipina articles to include the entire content, not just a link to the archive, because the archive links were incorrect. Also, just in case!

I’ve just discovered that one of the PINOYexpats contributors has made an archive of old posts available.  You can find it here. The formatting isn’t always pretty, but it’s the content that counts.

This means that I can now post two of the articles I had considered lost. Watch this space.

Because I like to show off my Mum’s cakes. Many years ago, she made this for us.

Photography by Alan Khan (click to enlarge)

Also, my debut cake had stairs.

And did I mention it’s chocolate cake inside?

Earlier this month I wrote a guest post for the Australia Women Writers Challenge blog discussing whether or not romance fiction is inherently feminist. Here’s an excerpt:

When we consider what romance fiction brings to feminism, it’s not enough to talk about what we as individuals get out of romance fiction or how we interpret this book or that. Knowing the genre’s popularity among female readers, we should also be asking: How do women read romance and why do they love these books so much? Only then, I think, will we have a better understanding of the genre’s importance and influence in women’s lives.