I haven’t always liked books.
As a child, reading wasn’t easy for me so I avoided it. My mom, however, had a different plan. She ordered Hooked on Phonics (it worked for me!) and taught me to read. That created a problem.
I read everything!
It didn’t take long to read through the Baby Sitter’s Club and Sweet Valley High. By the time I was in high school, I’d exhausted the young readers’ books, but there wasn’t a YA section back then. I went from Nancy Drew to adult fiction, but that led to another problem.
When I was a teenager, my only options were Christian historical or Harlequin romances.
Once again, it didn’t take long to read all of Jeanette Oke’s and Bodie and Brock Thoene’s books. I was too young to get Harlequin novels from the library, so a friend loaned me some of her mother’s (which I hid from my mom!). There just weren’t many other options.
After I got my degree in English from Hillsdale College, I was so burned out on books that I avoided them and stopped reading for many years.
Then my husband was diagnosed with cancer.*
While he slept after chemo treatments, I went to the library. Books became my escape. Once again, however, I quickly read through everything that interested me, but my husband still had weeks of treatments, surgeries, and recovery. When I couldn’t find any new authors to enjoy, I decided to write my own book.
When I started writing, I decided to fill that middle ground between prairie romances and bodice rippers. I decided to write a story that my teenage-self could have read on the couch in front of my family.
That’s why I write clean fiction—no gratuitous sex, swearing, or violence. Just witty characters, hopeful plots, and a healthy dose of romance.
That doesn’t mean the characters’ lives are easy or they never make bad decisions. It means those situations will be handled in a PG/PG-13 manner that you can read in front of your family without feeling embarrassed (my niece read my first novel at my dad’s house when she was 12-years-old). That’s my clean read guarantee.
When I’m not writing, I read. I love all forms of fiction, so I also watch TV and movies too (I’m a big fan of action/adventure movies and police procedurals). Sometimes I let my husband control the TV, so I’ve watched my fair share of “The Curse of Oak Island” and Alaska frontier shows.
*My husband survived two surgeries and nine weeks of chemo, and he’s now cancer free!
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