Hello! And thank you for inviting me to blog with you. I’m sure you’ll find that my methods of book-writing are quite different from the ones you’ve already seen here – because I’m not a particularly analytical person. Well, I take that back. I was extremely analytical when I worked as a critical care nurse, although there was a lot of … hmmmm … learned instinct at play then, too. For nursing, I took courses in anatomy and physiology, pharmacology and pathophysiology, and quickly put to use everything I learned. Soon I didn’t have to think twice about my actions when I worked in the ICU – they came as second nature.

There’s an analogy here. My mom was a high school English teacher, so I had a very solid background in English and English lit. When I was a kid, we were all expected to express ourselves correctly, both verbally and in writing. But I will readily admit that I’ve forgotten most of the rules of grammar, and I couldn’t tell you what an iambic pentameter was if my life depended on it. (I could make something up, though;-)). Still, the fact that I’ve forgotten the formal rules doesn’t mean that I don’t use them. I do – they’re just part of my cerebral engrams – I’m not conscious of my training, but I know (almost by instinct) when I read something that isn’t right.

I’ve been an avid reader all my life, but it’s only in the past ten years or so that I’ve been writing. My youngest child was about eight years old when I started, and I only did it as a lark – it was something to do to help me unwind after work. During my last few years as a nurse, I’d get home at about 1:00 am and couldn’t go to sleep right away. So I either read or tried my hand at writing. I’d done enough reading of romance novels to see how they were structured, although I didn’t really think of them as “structured.” I saw common elements – the conflict between the hero and heroine, the growth of attraction and development of emotion, the HEA.

I wrote two books: One was called The White Rose, and is a rambling tome of about 600 pages. I never submitted it anywhere. The other was a Medieval story I called The Rescue. By this time, my youngest was ten or eleven years old, and I was ready to get back to work full time. I told my husband that I was either going back to nursing full time, or I was going to pursue writing as a career. He suggested that I submit my work somewhere.

But where? I’d never heard of RWA, and I didn’t belong to any other writing groups. I did my scribbling in my tiny office in the wee hours of the morning. My neighbor (an English professor) suggested that I attend a local writer’s conference, which I did. Here’s where I got a few clues about the business of writing, which is a whole different thing from the craft of writing. Anyway, I found out where I could submit a manuscript without having an agent. Harlequin. I made a printout of The Rescue and mailed it on February 10, 1998 to the senior editor at Harlequin Historicals. On February 20th, I got a call from Harlequin, the editor telling me that they loved my book. I was going to have to cut 60 pages and change its name, but they definitely wanted it. Obviously, this is unusual. My manuscript must have hit the right desk at the right moment in time.

So this was my first in a long line of books that have been titled by marketing departments. The Rescue came out as The Bride of Windermere in 1999. Of the eleven books that I’ve published since, I think maybe three have names that I chose. Sigh. I’m either really bad at it, or the marketing departments are bad, but they just don’t know it! I have no idea what makes a good title - I never buy a book by its title. I always read the back cover blurb, and sometimes I’ll open it up and see if I like the writing. And I love discovering new authors who have been around awhile - they’ve got backlists!

Back to my non-analytical self. Yeah, I guess I do analyze, but not in a particularly codified way. I’ve never written according to any rules. I know that the hero and heroine need to battle certain odds (whatever they may be) in order to get together. They have to be won over by each other’s actions - not their internal dialogue, not their backgrounds. Take your favorite book and see how the author did it. Look (not so much at the plot but) at the small increments of emotion that grow between the h&h as the book progresses. That’s how I figured out how to write a romance novel.