I knew from the age of 8 I wanted to be a writer. I was 15 when I wrote a scintillating short story targeted to the confession magazines, my first attempt at getting published. Alas, “Drunkenness Cost Me My Womanhood” was rejected. In the next decade, I fed my need to write by penning long letters (a dying art), Christmas card notes, English essays and term papers.
Armed with a degree in English, I was tending bar in a Las Vegas casino (long story) when I had an epiphany: I would do everything in my power to become a TV writer. Two weeks later I was living in L.A., and a few months after that, I landed a job as a production assistant at MTM, where I learned from the inside how to write and rewrite scripts. In partnership with another P.A., Judie Neer, I started writing spec scripts. Finally one was accepted by “The Tony Randall Show.” Over the next several years we were freelance TV writers, with credits including “The Love Boat,” “WKRP in Cincinnati” and “Remington Steele.” Then we both got married and started birthing babies. My little family left the L.A. smog for a small town in northern California.
Over the next two decades, I wrote a parenting column that won a national award, several books (Letters from a Pregnant Coward, The Dictionary According to Mommy, What You Don’t Know About Having Babies), children’s poetry (in Kids Pick the Funniest Poems and other anthologies) and plays produced in community theaters.
I also got divorced and moved my two sons across the country to Myrtle Beach, SC. There I wrote hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles and columns and co-owned a regional business/lifestyle magazine.
Several years ago I moved back to Ohio from whence I began, where I enjoying hanging out with family and old friends, including the same group I ate lunch with in the cafeteria in 7th grade. Since returning to my roots, I’ve read more than 1,000 romance novels and novellas. Many I loved, some I felt “enh” after reading and others I wanted to reach into the book and hit at least one of the protagonists with a brick.
That’s when I decided to write my own romance novels and novellas, the kind I wanted to read, with smart, funny protagonists; and interesting (to me, anyway), not overly complicated plots with conflicts not so contrived they make me want to gnash my teeth. You might disagree, and all I have to say about that is different strokes for different folks. My youngest son once told me he absolutely hated English classes because with math, 2+2 is always going to be 4, but judging writing is so subjective. In my younger years I might have turned myself into a pretzel trying to fit my writing into some publisher’s niche. Not happening anymore. Now I’m writing for me, in my own unique voice.
I’ve always been a much better writer than a salesperson, hence the e-publishing route. And I’m basking in the control. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
