From Keyboard to Bookstore: The Long and Winding Road

For years, I was an author-in-search-of-a-genre.  I started with professional stuff:  annual assessment reports, accreditation self-studies, articles on music education or aesthetic responsiveness.  Thrillers like that.  Then, without warning—in the middle of writing my doctoral dissertation—my right brain apparently kicked in.  Suddenly I had the urge to write something more creative than research studies.

At that time, I wasn’t a big reader of fiction, but I did love historical sagas and historical romances.  So, when my fingers began searching for a creative outlet at the computer keyboard, that’s what I wrote:  huge historical romance sagas.  I finished three or four of them, and one day, when I was up to my ears in historical research, another writer said to me, “Why don’t you just write a modern romance?  It would be a lot easier.”

So I did, still not knowing what genre I wanted to write.  About then, I decided to get more serious about my closet hobby and entered the romance in some contests.  It did very well, even in the biggies, but I just didn’t think that genre was for me.  I widened my own reading to include cop stories, and almost instantly, I was hooked.  I love to watch cops solve crimes.  And I still love a bit of romance.  Finally, I’d found my genre.

One Scream Away was my first foray into romantic suspense.  I had met Neil Sheridan, the hero, in a previous book and was intrigued with him from the get-go.  I knew when he showed up carrying a big gun and an attitude that he would be the hero in a story sometime.  That’s all I knew about him, though…I didn’t know what he did for a living or what kind of background or love life he’d had, and I didn’t know he would be just the right man to hunt down a truly twisted serial killer.  I only knew he needed a book of his own.

Indeed, I made the road to publication of Neil’s story a good deal longer than necessary, simply by being chicken:  After an agent asked for this manuscript I held off sending it to her for two full years!  Thankfully, after all that time, she still took it and managed to sell.  The Sheridan series was born.  The story of Neil’s brother, Mitch Sheridan, will be out in July 2010.