Since the first two romances I ever wrote are out in paperback now, I thought I'd tell you how I got into writing romance in the first place. 😀 (Warning - this is long!)
My youngest daughter was born with some serious medical issues (she's doing good now!) which meant she was in pain for the first few years of her life. This meant she didn't sleep for more than forty minutes at a time, so I spent the nights walking the floor with her, and when she dozed off I napped or read. I read a LOT. And after years of reading crime and thrillers, I found I needed something lighter during those long nighttime hours, so I turned to contemporary romance instead.
Of course, this was in the days before Kindle had made it to New Zealand, so there was no one-clicking a new book in the middle of the night when I ran out of reading material. On one such night, when there was nothing to read, I'd dozed off on the sofa with my daughter in the pram beside me. A few minutes later, I woke with the first line of a book in my head: "Icarus was an idiot." Not only that, but I knew exactly who was saying that line and the life that little girl had ahead of her. I knew who would love her for who she was and wouldn't want to change her, and who would keep her grounded when she went a little too far with her crazy ideas. In other words, Maddie and Dean were born that night. So instead of reading over the next few weeks, I spent my night hours - in the minutes my daughter was asleep - writing. And that's how Mad Love was born. 😀
But, Mad Love wasn't the first book I'd written. At this point I'd written two crime novels and had an agent who was trying to sell them to a publisher. The agent didn't represent romance and because that was the genre I'd fallen in love with and decided I wanted to write, we parted ways. (The crime novels are still in a drawer!)
Without an agent to sell my work, I sent Mad Love to Harlequin, to see if they wanted it. And they did. Only, they had lots of changes going on at the time so they lost my book. And lost it again. And again. In the two years they had it, the editor changed four times and they lost it three times - and I got fed up dealing with them. I also wondered if I'd ever be a published writer, and if anyone would ever get to read my stories. I was feeling pretty discouraged overall.
By then, I'd written another three books - Laura's Big Break, The Davina Code, and Lingerie Wars - and I wasn't sure what to do with them. Or if there was anything I could do with them! That's when two writer friends of mine Kris Pearson and Diana Fraser suggested I try this new thing called ebook self-publishing. They talked me through the process and held my hand all the way. And Mad Love went live in 2012. Followed closely by the other books I'd already written. Lingerie Wars made it to No 1 in Amazon's romance category (although there wasn't much competition at that time!) and I got the encouragement I needed to keep on writing.
I also decided to stick with writing contemporary romance and romantic comedies instead of going back to writing crime. But I couldn't help some of my previous thriller and crime experience from sneaking in, which led to the Benson Security and Red Zone series.
And now here I am, a traditionally and self published author, with twenty books under her belt and lots more planned. All because I needed something uplifting and hope-filled to get me through a few hard years. That's why I love the romance genre. It's all about hope and happy ever afters. Sometimes that's exactly what we all need.
Anyway, that's how I got started writing romance novels. And thanks to those of you who've bought and read the books I write, I get to keep on doing what I love.
As for London Girls, it's a duo of the first two books I wrote - Mad Love and Laura's Big Break. Maybe sometime I'll tell you about how Laura's experiences in Holland are based on the time I lived there - including the part where she rides into a canal! In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed reading about how I got into romance. 😀 ... See MoreSee Less
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