It's all my parents' fault. Since I was about two seconds old, they were reading to me. Any book they could find. Any book I could find. And it kept going from there. I even won a blue ribbon in our library's summer reading club. Now, I look back and wonder if the thirty books a week I was reading back then was actually a sign of my limited social skills...but I digress.
The journey from reader to author was a natural path after that.
I wrote my first book when I was ten, but quickly abandoned it when someone asked to read it. Didn't realize that was part of the deal! Fortunately, in my wizened old age, I've managed to overcome that phobia. Good thing, huh?
Many years later, I started writing again when I was a frustrated lawyer at a Boston firm. Proofing bank merger documents until two in the morning while I waited for the printer to pump out legalese was not exactly fulfilling me (I know, it sounds brilliantly fun). To survive, I started writing a novel to create an alternate reality to help me through my day. I lived the dual life for a while, but when I began fantasizing about ways to rid the earth of all lawyers, myself included, I decided I'd better bail from the lawyer scene before they locked me up.
That's when I fully committed to the writing gig. It took four years and eighteen manuscripts before I sold my first book. June 30, 2002: the day my wonderful agent called me to tell me I was a published author!
Things snowballed after that in the most wonderful ways. I won the Golden Heart award in July, sold another book in August, and by October had sold a total of seven books. Talk about dreams coming true!
But enough about me. Let's talk about the good stuff. The relationships between men and women.
With that five o'clock stubble, his sense of honor, and the way he gets all flustered when you want to talk about emotions, the right man (or the wrong one!) can really get to a woman. And the way he falls so hard for the right woman? Powerful stuff.
Before I met my own true love (Josh and me above), I thrived on the dating scene. There's nothing like the thrill of a new romance, the shiver of excitement at your first kiss, the angst of wondering if he's really going to call...and of course, the magical feeling of truly falling in love.
And along with men come all the other things a woman has to deal with: career, friends, family, bad hair, pants that don't fit, dwindling bank accounts... How can any of us get through it without a sense of humor? Sometimes all you can do is laugh. It's either that or burst into tears, pull all your eyelashes out and run through the grocery store throwing cantaloupes at everyone who looks even slightly happy.
Since the latter could get you carted off to a room with padded walls, I vote for laughing whenever possible. And when it's someone else's pain, it's that much easier to laugh.
What better place to laugh in heartfelt empathy about someone else's problems than in a wonderful book? That's what I do, weaving stories where you'll find stubborn, courageous women struggling to cope with the men in their lives, not to mention their careers, their friends, their families, and any of those other things that life can throw at you. And there's something about their plucky attitude and ebullient spirit that makes it impossible not to laugh with their valiant attempts to battle onward. These women have fire, and they aren't afraid to show it!
And now here I am, absolutely the luckiest person in the world, because I get paid to sit in front of the computer and make myself laugh, cry, and get all warm and shivery when I reach the happy ending. And I get to share my dreams and my stories with you. That's the best part.
When I'm not at the computer or at work, I get to hang with my own personal hero. I have two great Labradors (Kip and Oscar) and a couple of crazy cats who thrive on harassing me right when I'm in the heat of a great scene or the climatic moment where he realizes he can't live without her and...
Ahem. Look at me. Getting caught up again. Typical, isn't it? I must be off. I have another fun story that needs to be told.
