Practice, practice, practice

I won't apologize for my literary background. It's a large part of who I am. But when I decided I wanted to turn my hand to writing romance, I had to put a lot of prejudices aside. And I had to forget an awful lot about what I'd learned about literary writing. But I'll talk about that another time. Right now I want to explain how I fell into romance.

Frankly, I'd never read much romance, even as a girl. And I'd never read any category romance at all. A few years ago I enjoyed a fabulous trip to Scotland. I loved every bit of it. When I got home in August I was in a shop looking for a light summer read, and a tartan book spine caught my eye. It was Diana Gabaldon's first Jamie and Clair story. Titled Outlander in America, I think it's called Crossstitch in Britain.

I took it home, cracked it open, and began. I was totally bored. In fact I almost gave it up but I didn't have anything else handy so I kept going. Then I met Jamie.

What can I say? Like millions of other women, I fell in love with an imaginary Scot from the 18th century. I voraciously read the other 3 books in the series. Then I though about what I liked in these books. And I thought about the other great love stories I've enjoyed over the years. They may not have had happy endings, but they were love stories nonetheless. Anna Karenina. The English Patient. Pride and Prejudice. Marjorie Morningstar. The list is enormous.

So then I thought about turning my story of an adulterous wife into a love story. Focus on the new affair, rather than the broken marriage. Give the lovers the hope of a future together. In other words, turn the story from a tragedy into a romance. With a happily-ever-after.

I admit that I fought against this urge. But I was given a reality check when I started researching publishers. I learned that romance was the genre. Romance outsold all the other genres combined (or so I was lead to believe). So I joined the Romance Writers of America, and began to study.

I read that a writer who wants to begin writing in a particular genre must read at least 100 books in that genre. So I got busy. A kind editor from Harlequin gave me a few names in the erotic romance genre, and I ran to the bookstore to buy Megan Hart, Jina Bacarr, Lora Leigh, among others. I spent a fortune.

And honestly, I didn't enjoy everything that I read. But I did like some of it. So I focussed on what appealed to me, trying to understand why.

All the time I was studying I was redrafting my own novel, Cult of the Black Virgin. My heroine was no longer a wife on vacation with her husband, but a young woman running from the pressure to commit to marriage, leaving her fiancé at home while she traveled alone. She meets her French lover, struggles with her issues, and, ultimately everything turns out happily in the end.

This wasn't what I originally had in mind at all. But, the funny thing was, I love it. Somehow, with its happy ending the story was more emotionally satisfying to me. And so I wrote another. a sweeter story. And that one, Just Desserts, I really enjoyed writing as a romance right from the start.

And that's how I've come to love romance. There are now 2 sequels to Cult of the Black Virgin, and I've just begun a series called Tracking Tor. Mirage, the first book, is set in Syria before the revolution.

I'm going to get back to work on it right now. I'm almost at the best part--the seduction scene in the ruined amphitheater at Palmyra, deep in the desert....