W R I T I N G R O M A N C E
WITH A PASSION FOR HISTORY
ABOUT ME
I was born in California’s agricultural Central Valley, and my brother arrived two years later. I turned seven the summer our parents moved us from the outskirts of Los Angeles to a tiny community in northern Indiana, where my best friends morphed from Latinas to Amish girls. My first research obsession? The Lincoln assassination. At age ten, I raided my father's Civil War texts for more information. Aliens became my second obsession--I still base my ideal of feminine strength on Ellen Ripley--but the third and most influential emerged with the debut of "The Young Riders," an early '90s TV show about the Pony Express. I became the foremost authority on pony express history at Mishawaka High School. Not much of a boast, but research, fan fiction, and historical romances kept me out of trouble.
As a National Merit Scholar, I attended Bowling Green State University in Ohio. I traveled to Norwich, England, for my junior year, studying at the University of East Anglia, where I met my husband. After a brief stint as an unaccomplished art major, I graduated from BGSU in both English and history. Then The Ohio State University accepted me as a graduate teaching assistant in their history program. My master's thesis? "Reading Jesse James and Wild Bill: the Origins of Two Western Legends and the Search for Post-Bellum Identity." A page-turner!
Although I began writing romance in high school, I didn't finish a project until 2006. By then the need to write was too strong to ignore. I'd exhausted my interest in the Old West and started studying everything else, setting my first manuscript in 1804 Salzburg. After slugging through those initial rejections, I wrote what became What a Scoundrel Wants--my swashbuckling contribution to the Robin Hood legends--and an Italian time travel called "Sundial," which won The Wild Rose Press's "Through the Garden Gate" short story contest. Both stories were accepted for publication in autumn 2007, thrilling me in ways I'll never be able to express, no matter my love for words.
