For the life of me I can't recall which one first dubbed us The Witches, but the name certainly stuck. And for anyone who's interested, here's how we met.

My husband credits himself with discovering eHarlequin. I must confess I don't remember this occasion since I thought I found the site all by myself. But what I do remember is the amazingly warm welcome I received in Ola's Clinic, the thread run by (the then unpublished) Medical author, Olivia Gates.

There was another very friendly lady there by the name of Pat Posner. One day Pat emailed me out of the blue (and quite made my day!) to chat about our writing, and within a few weeks we began to exchange chapters to crit and OMG were we polite with each other!! However as time passed we relaxed and began to tell each other what we really thought (cause what is the point of having CPs if you can't give/take constructive criticism?)

Then Pat won an on-line pitch with an editor from M&B and while she was in the cyber waiting room she hitched up with a fellow pitchee, Amanda Ashby. They met up later in the real world at the RNA Conference in Durham.

After the conference I got in touch with Amanda after reading some of her work and we exchanged a few emails (where would we be without the internet, that's what I'd like to know? Second thoughts I wouldn't like to know! Purgatory springs to mind!) A few weeks later Amanda mentioned she'd like to read something of mine and I was so excited by this offer that I immediately sent the poor girl an entire manuscript! Thankfully it didn't kill our fledgling friendship and then there were three in our CP group.

In January 2004 my husband and I decided to visit the UK and craftily arranged it so I'd be able to attend the RNA conference in July. A thread was set up on eHarlequin for those attending, and by lurking there I discovered a friend of Amanda's, Sara Hantz, would also be going.

Sara, another ex-pat, lived in New Zealand and quite by chance we discovered we'd be on the same plane from Singapore to Heathrow. Wow! What an opportunity to get together before the conference!

So we exchanged a couple of formal emails introducing ourselves to each other and then towards the end of the flight Sara came downstairs looking for me.

I think she must have batted her eyelashes at the flight attendant as he let me ascend to the splendour of business class, where Sara and I then proceeded to be Painfully Polite with each other.

The roar of the engines prevented anything but genteel yelling (and I of course never yell) and then we hit some turbulence. After some toilet talk (ie aircraft loos are ridiculously tiny - what did you think I was talking about?!) I had to stagger back to my seat to prepare for landing.

We did meet up at the conference, but the funny thing is we didn't become friends until after I returned to Australia and Sara returned to New Zealand. A few weeks later we became The Witches (warts and all, cackle cackle), a quartet of CPs, MSN sluts and great friends.