I always loved to write, but never thought of writing as a career. To be truthful, I never considered anything for a career. If you read my bio, you know that I switched residences, college majors, and jobs at the drop of a hat. I’d like to blame my lack of focus on my parents. Not because it’s their fault, but just because I’d like to blame someone. Parents are usually good for placing blame, and in the case of my parents, they are perfect scapegoats since they moved every few minutes during my childhood. After all, the inability to settle down to one thing just might be genetic.
But I’m an adult now and I take full responsibility for my life, especially since I no longer see myself as unfocused. Instead I’ve decided it’s only natural that I’d want to write in three different genres–historical romance, humorous contemporary fiction, and how-to book–because these three genres represent my life.
Historical Romance . . . From the age of eleven when I read a historical romance where the scullery maids were stealing all the large cucumbers from the kitchen, I was hooked on that fiction sub-genre. Though I wasn’t exactly sure what was going on with those cucumbers, I was a bright girl with a fanciful imagination and boy, could I imagine… The initial titillation of those “bodice-rippers” turned into a true love of the genre. My favorite authors are Judith McNaught, Jo Beverley, Mary Balogh, Julia Quinn, Lisa Kleypas, Eloisa James, Christina Dodd, Lorraine Heath, Madeline Hunter, Cathy Maxwell and Judith Ivory, to mention just a few, and my favorite hero/heroine combo is the duke and the virgin. The characters from Judith McNaught’s books were the inspiration for my Regency-set historical romance, DUKE OF DECEPTION.
Humorous Contemporary Fiction . . . I’ve published many personal essays, most of which are humorous stories about experiences with my family. People were always telling me I should write a book, but it didn’t occur to me to turn my personal life into humorous fiction until I read Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series. As soon as I read One For The Money, the idea popped into my head: create a family based on my own nutty family, throw in true experiences that most people don’t believe happened–unless they were part of them–and spice up the heroine–a lot. Thus was born RULES OF LYING, the first in a series of RULES OF books about a best-selling historical romance author who gets her heart stomped on by her lying, cheating boyfriend and can’t write a saleable romance again. The heroine goes home to Florida and proceeds to get into trouble with her family, her neighbors, and the law, while endeavoring to write. But don’t worry. The hunky cowboy and the drop-dead-gorgeous doctor help to make up for her other troubles.
How-to Books . . . One of my former jobs was that of computer tutor. Though I didn’t exactly like tutoring people one on one, I did enjoy putting together instructional pages to help my pupils remember what they learned. Those pages turned into BASICS OF Windows The Easy Guide to Your PC. Concise and easy to read, includes large screen shots, simple step-by-step instructions, and a question and answer section that lists the most-asked questions for the book’s topics. I may write how-to books on other subjects. It all depends on time.
