How it began

I was just thinking about when I started reading romance. I was in high school, and my friend Jennifer and her mom were romance readers. In those early days, I read historical romances by Kathleen Woodiwiss and similar authors. I loved being swept away by the love stories set in different times and locales. When I went to college, there was a used bookstore close to campus. When I wasn’t studying, I’d browse through those store shelves and bring stories set during the Civil War, the Revolutionary War and the Spanish Southwest back to my dorm room to read. After I graduated but still lived on campus, in married housing while my husband went to grad school and I worked at a weekly newspaper, I frequented the used bookstore more often because I didn’t have to study anymore and had lots of free time to read.

Somewhere in the midst of all this reading, I began to write. Being a lover of historical romance, particularly American-set historicals, my first manuscript was a historical set along the Oregon Trail. It went through countless versions, beginning as early drafts pecked out on our first home computer. During lunch breaks at work, I’d write new scenes. But since we worked on typesetters instead of PCs with common word processing programs, whatever I wrote I had to print out and retype into the computer when I got home. I remember reading accounts of women’s journeys along the Oregon Trail, even playing the Oregon Trail video game to get some extra details about life in a wagon train. I’m still fascinated by the Oregon Trail. On a trip out West a few years ago, I drove along portions of the trail, seeing sites such as Chimney Rock, Scottsbluff and Fort Laramie, landmarks and important resupply stops for those early travelers. In Nebraska, I even saw ruts made by those long-ago wagon wheels.

After I joined my first RWA chapter and my first critique group and began to read more widely in the romance field, I ventured into writing contemporary romance and haven’t written any more historicals beyond the first one. Eventually, I married two genres I like to read — romance and mystery — and started writing romantic suspense, which has been the subgenre with which I’ve had the most success. All four of my Golden Heart finals and the one win have been with romantic suspense manuscripts. The book I recently revised per an editor request and which is now on that editor’s desk is a romantic suspense. I’m hopeful that book will turn into my first sale. I certainly don’t lack for story ideas in the romantic suspense area.

So how did you get started reading and/or writing romance? Who were the first romance authors you read?

This entry was posted at 10:45 pm | Print This Post