I thought maybe we’d start off about by talking about writing because writing is kind of a strange thing. People think it’s strange and unusual for someone to be a writer, but I’ve always been one. Who knows why other people write – not me – although presumably some write for the same reasons as I do. I write because my head is full of stories. It’s always been that way. I’ve always written (some of) them down.

There have been times when I have told my stories to people – kind of a raconteur thing – but I got over that (and the bad poetry) with puberty. (Be glad!) I’ve always thought that I was interested in stories but over the years, I’ve come to realize that what I’m really interested in is people.

And what particularly interests me about people is their relationships with other people.

When I had the wacky idea that maybe I could be a writer for my job (it is a crazy idea) I went back and looked through all of my stories and realized that they were all love stories. I assumed that this meant that they were romance novels, but a painful process (one that mostly followed the chronology of me submitting my work to an editor or agent and that editor or agent rapidly rejecting it) persuaded me otherwise.
I learned the expectations and I followed the so-called rules and I sold my first book manuscript in 1992.

There are several funny things about this. One is that the so-called rules are really squishy. No one is really sure why they are rules – much less who made them up – and I’m unconvinced that they count. I like to test those “rules”, kind of like pushing on a wall to see if it’s solid.

Why can’t an historical be written in first person? Why can’t a romance be told from the hero’s point of view? Why can’t a romance have a chronology that isn’t linear? (I’m working on that one.) When Sybil and I first corresponded, for example, she said she wasn’t sure what ONE MORE TIME was, but it was a good read. And this kind of comment both mystifies and amuses me. OMT is a love story and it’s a romance. It starts with the introduction of the external conflict (a man walking out of his marriage will often be perceived as a problem by his wife) and ends with an HEA. In between, they fall in love all over again. It’s true that they aren’t technically strangers at the start of the book, but they’ve become strangers and I think that’s kind of interesting. I wanted to watch them fix their marriage. I wanted to see if they could do it.

And that kind of question is always what suckers me into writing a book in the first place. If a woman had lost a breast young to cancer, been hurt emotionally and physically, and had shut the door against the world as a result, what kind of man would persuade her to answer his knock? If a man never took anything seriously and lived his life like a big kid, what kind of woman would it take to make him want to grow up?

What would persuade someone who had always wanted to do something creative (like write a book) follow that dream, if he had always been told that creative stuff was futile, silly, or suitable only for hobbies? What would he think the price of following his dream would be? Following these characters and witnessing their choices (and the
results) is an adventure for me and one that I really enjoy. If all of New York sank into the Atlantic and there was no publishing business any more (or no romance market anymore), I’d still write. I’d probably stack the book manuscripts in a dresser drawer, but I’d write – to find out what happens next. The bonus of exploring these question in the writing is that I get to meet some interesting secondary characters: the Coxwell series was characterized for me by a lot of mouthy teenagers, who were just too much to write.

The second funny thing about having sold my first book fifteen years ago, is that I’m still writing – or maybe I should say that I’m still publishing. I knew I would write, but I didn’t know what I would write and I didn’t know that I would still continue to publish. (Because **SPOILER ALERT** the writing is the fun part.) I certainly didn’t think that I’d still be writing romances – but on the other hand, we all have such different experiences, not just with love and romance, but with personal relationships of all kinds. And I’m still interested in how we interact with each other. If anything, there are more stories to be written than ever before.

Writing is an adventure and one I couldn’t survive without. The most wonderful thing is that other people read my books, so these characters and their issues live in other places than my imagination. I find it pretty exciting to meet readers who talk about this character or that one from my books, as if those characters were real — and maybe, by my writing them and our talking about them, they are.