![]() ![]() Everywhere around me I see massive success on the national and international stages. I live in Utah, the galactic center of children’s writers. To say I enjoy an eclectic combination of literature would be an understatement, so picking a path wasn’t simple. Rather, I borrowed them from her mom, who had a shelf filled with Agatha Christie novels. I read whatever I found there, but I also borrowed books from a school friend. Our library had a small children’s fiction section in English. When I was ten, my family moved abroad for three years. I’ve been writing a variety of stories since I got a Buddy L typewriter for my fifth birthday: adventures about rodents (thank you, Beverly Cleary), a mystery set in the Bermuda Triangle, angsty teen poetry. Someone suggested, “What do you like to read? Write that.” I bemoaned to my then-critique group that I didn’t know which direction to go. They took chances on some, including a duology about the not-remotely-romantic topic of deployment and reentry, but I didn’t really fit my publisher anymore. My publisher warned that women’s fiction didn’t sell. Our intuition was right: the collections sold well, one hitting the USA Today list.Īll the while, my “romances” leaned into heavier topics. I saw a hole in the market, as did two friends, so together we founded an anthology series with romances no spicier than PG-13, with no religious content. Sweet romance was lumped into Christian, which posed problems, not the least of which was expressed by one writer: “I can’t call my romances Christian. Amazon didn’t yet have the “clean and wholesome” category. Virtually all sweet romance at the time was religious/inspirational. Then Fifty Shades blew up the romance world. ![]() I set the mystery-and my suspense ideas-on a shelf to gather dust with the many creepy resource books I’d collected about poisons, death, injury, firearms, and more. What I thought would be my fourth was a murder mystery, but the publisher suggested I do more historical, as my last book had outsold the others. It didn’t have a suspense subplot, but it did open with a house burning down. That story also had a mother deeply concerned about her daughter. Readers said it was my best work yet, which told me that stretching myself had probably made me grow as a writer. My third was my first foray into historical fiction, which scared me. My second novel also had a romantic arc and a suspense subplot. It had a suspense subplot, but there wasn’t really a way to get that across in the title or cover. I made some tweaks so the title would point to that underlying theme. It sounded too romantic for a book where, to me, the entire point was something else: the concern of a mother for her child. When my first novel was published by a small press, I really didn’t like the title they picked. ![]()
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