With apologies to Rocky...

My kids and their best friends are already having some fun with The Rose Garden being a part of DABWAHA this year.

They all watched, intrigued, as The Winter Sea played to an early defeat last year, and since this year there are no bribes allowed, they decided The Rose Garden should get its game on as early as possible.

Here's the result..

(Disclaimer: I cracked the eggs. And the beer was already out of the bottles before the 12-year olds touched them :-)




Here's a link to the video on YouTube.

Game on! It's DABWAHA time!

And what, you ask, is DABWAHA? And why am I SHOUTING IT ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS?

Well, for those of you who haven't yet experienced it, DABWAHA stands for "Dear Author Bitchery Writing Award for Hellagood Authors" (being administered jointly by the reviewers of Dear Author and Smart Bitches ♥ Trashy Books), and it's the annual March Madness of romantic novels, in which 64 novels go in, and only 1 crawls out the winner.

The rules of play are, in keeping with the game's March Madness origins, complex. There are brackets to be filled out, and multiple pairings-off, and much trash-talking.

In short, it's wicked fun.

And I have just learned that The Rose Garden is one of the DABWAHA nominees for this year's tournament, in the Contemporary category, making me both thrilled and very nervous. Because honestly, I'm not so good at trash-talking. I blame it on the fact that I'm Canadian, and therefore have been raised to say "I'm sorry" when someone bumps into ME...

So when The Winter Sea was nominated last year, and the trash-talking commenced, I truly sucked at it, and had to turn to bribery instead. Heading into a hard-hitting round against Kate Elliott's Cold Magic, I offered all the Canadian bribes I could think of, from the letter "zed" to the Best Beer in the World to Shawn Ashmore looking like this...

Alas, none of it worked, and Kate clobbered me.

Thankfuly, all bribes are out, this year (which is good, because once I'd offered up Shawn Ashmore, I was pretty much out of material...)

Bracket selection starts early next week, with the first round of voting beginning on Thursday the 15th. You'll find all the books and the details right here, on the DABWAHA 2012 website.

You can also see all the nominees here, and, for one more day at least, put forward your own choices for books to fill the one remaining slot in every category.

If you've never played the tournament, you really should give it a go. Trust me, you'll have a blast doing it, and there are usually awesome prizes for the winning readers.

What books would YOU pick, to add to the categories?
And any advice for me?