About me

This is how I became a writer.

My mother, Bertha, and my father, Bob, were both prolific oral story tellers. Bertha told stories of growing up on the Canadian prairies, and Bob told hunting and fishing tales.

I learned to read at five, and the same year, I started school in the one room schoolhouse my father had attended. There were fifteen pupils, most of them my relatives. I was put into Grade Two because I could read all the primers.

Then in Grade Three disaster struck. Our teacher that year was Miss Flett, and halfway through the year she was shot by a jealous lover. We were loaded into taxis and taken to town school, a three story brick purgatory with a whopping hundred students—and a library, which I read from A to Z.

I read my way into middle age. I was 46 by the time I wrote my first romance and sold it to Harlequin.

I wrote about 55 romances in the next twenty years. I'd read my way through two marriages, three pregnancies and two divorces, learning by osmosis about plot, character, pacing and what makes a book readable.

I think writers are born with a genetic quirk. They need stories the way other, normal people need oxygen and food. It’s an addiction.

And if they can’t find an intriguing story, they simply write one of their own.