Welcome to my first blog post! Some of you probably follow my antics on Facebook and Twitter). But let me take this opportunity to tell you a little bit more about who I am and what I write.
I was born in Louisville, Ky., in the late 1950s. Growing up, I was a very quiet person in public, but not at home, where I was the clown. I expressed myself in writing at least by the time I was in high school. (My first sale was during sophomore year when my 8th-grade sister paid me $2.50 to write a story for her for a class assignment. It was one of those tragic romances only a teenager could write/read.) I had been bitten by the writing bug and here I am.
Oh, yes, then all that life stuff happened. I met my husband by answering his ad in The Mother Earth News (TMEN—an omen perhaps?), a rural independence magazine. The next year, I moved to very rural New York State (city girl living on a dirt road!). We’ve been married 28 years this month and have two grown children. Eventually, though, I became homesick and depressed, so we moved to rural Kentucky. I earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism at the age of 44 and went to work as an editorial assistant at a small liberal-arts college. This year, during downsizing and restructuring, my job changed and I was made part-time. While attending an Artist’s Way workshop given by two friends, I had an epiphany. My job was a crazymaker/shadow artist and it was time for me to leave it and WRITE. Two days later, I turned in my resignation. My last day at the day job was April 15.
After taking about a week to de-stress, I started revising NOBODY’S ANGEL, which had sat untouched for nearly two years. While I had been dabbling at writing romances for 30 years, I never finished a novel—until two years ago. That’s when I discovered the new-to-me genre of erotic romance at a Romance Writers of America local chapter workshop. I went home and penned (in one month) what I thought was an erotic romance. The best part about it was that I finished it! But it will need a lot of work before it will be published.
Then I bought my first erotic romance—CLUB SHADOWLANDS, by Cherise Sinclair (www.cherisesinclair.com)—and saw the error of my ways. I’d written lots of kinky sex with a smattering of a romance, but fell short on character development and plot. So, I sat down again (I sit a lot in my new job!) and wrote NOBODY’S ANGEL (again, completed draft in a month).
I’m now on my third revision and will send it to my editor next week, along with the prequel to the RESCUE ME series, MASTERS AT ARMS (also set to be released in August). But the prequel only hints at things to come, but in it you will meet my slave-driving Masters—Adam, Marc, and Damian—and the women who will bring them to their knees.
The prequel is meant to 1) showcase my writing ability; 2) provide a low-cost (99 cents!) way to try out a new author; and 3) show the some major turning points in the lives of these brave and honorable men and how they came together while serving in a Marine Corps unit in Iraq. There’s a lot of emotional pain as they deal with life and the aftermath of war. Don't worry, you'll also get to see if I can write a "tittylation" scene (as a Facebook friend referred to the excerpt I posted on FB yesterday).
I love to read and write about the hetero BDSM lifestyle and, for the foreseeable future, all of my stories will have that as an element. More important, though, I LOVE to write stories about strong, but sometimes broken and hurting people finding each other and healing/rescuing each other through the power of love.
I hope you’ll come along for the journey by following this blog—and will follow the journeys of my characters in my books (as well as here). I love to share my works in progress (WIPs)—and will even share one or more of the Masters with you on occasion if you've been a very, very good subbie (or particularly bad).
