Reality
I've loved both history and romance for as long as I can remember. Growing up in Minnesota, I spent cold winter days crafting complicated plots for Barbie dolls and reading Laura Ingalls Wilder books and imagining wonderful stories while playing in the hot summer sun. In junior high, I discovered Judy Blume and twice started my own "coming of age" manuscripts (I still have the spiral notebook with its 100 plus handwritten pages). When I discovered romance, I read all the sub-genres, from sweet Harlequins to gothics to bodice rippers. But my heart set itself on historical romance when I picked up LaVyrle Spencer's The Fulfillment.
Still, I never really thought of writing as something I would actually do. I put away my notebook and studied history at South Dakota State University, planning to teach. The week after I received my B.A., I married Tim, the love of my life, and moved to Pierre, South Dakota where I actually did work as a teacher for a year. Tim and I shared a passion for history and our hobbies included participating in living history reenactments as well as in community theater.
Job transfers took us to Yuma, Arizona, where I served as a historic preservation specialist for the Quechan Indian Tribe at the Fort Yuma National Landmark. Our daughter Katrina was born in 1989 and writing was a distant memory. When we moved to Wyoming, I taught classes at the college level as well as adult basic education and GED classes at the state penitentiary. In 1993, one of my inmate students showed me a partial manuscript and told me he had just signed with an agent. Challenged, I figured I could do that, too.
I wrote my first 400 page manuscript in 6 weeks and thought it was the greatest piece of fiction ever. I was so wrong. Joining Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, I began to learn the writing craft and joined a critique group. Every time I mastered one technique, there was another waiting to be learned (as I suspect there always will be). I wrote slowly, in between my full time job and my commitments as a wife and mother. Thirteen years later, I sold my second manuscript, CHANCES, and became an author.
I still have the day job, now as director of a homeless shelter, and I'm still committed to my family. My interests include reading, historic research, directing community theater, and visiting historic sites. And, of course, writing. |
