Thursday, November 20, 2014

Romance in Texas


I want to welcome you to my blog by telling you a little bit about myself. As a child, I always loved stories. I loved reading them and making them up. For many years, I had trouble telling the truth. I tended to embellish, let us say.

My father wanted me to major in French and Spanish, but in second year French, I rebelled and quit going to class because I didn’t want to learn to say the same thing I could already say in English and Spanish in another language. He said, “What do you want to major in?” and I said, “English.” He swore I could never do anything of any value with an English major. But I’ve had so much fun.

I taught English until I had my first child. Suddenly when he was born and I was home all day, I thought that if I ever wanted to write, now was the time. Incredibly with a small baby and real estate to manage I wrote 8 hours a day. I really don’t remember ever dreaming that some day I wanted to be a writer, but I liked lots of creative pursuits.

Babies nap and have their quiet spells. I trained my darling son to a playpen, and he would play in the late afternoon at my feet while I typed. I did this even though my mother-in-law warned me he would be stupid because I wasn’t stimulating him enough. I believed that he needed to develop his imagination. He turned out just fine, and I became a writer.

It took me three years and a million words to get my first book, MIDNIGHT SURRENDER, published. And I’ve been writing ever since. Not that there haven’t been a lot of bumps in the road, the latest being, I bought myself out of my last multiple book contract and have decided to self-publish.
This is my most recent book.
Find it on Amazon here!

 Having a publisher that gets you onto bookshelves all over the world has been a wonderful experience. But I’ve had to write to very specific guidelines for the lines I’ve written for and, therefore, had to fulfill very specific editorial visions. Vast as my ignorance is in the self-publishing arena, what I am enjoying the most is having more control, especially about the kind of stories I choose to tell.

In the near future I will be publishing a series of contemporary romance novels set on a legendary ranch in Texas that will not be all that different from what I was doing for Harlequin and yet they will be completely my own.