Over in the QRFFC we’ve started answering some reader questions. I thought I’d share my answers here as well. If you’d like to read other author’s answers, come join the group.

Queer Romance Freebie & Fan Club

What made you decide to become an author?

I’ve always been writing, but the shift from writing just for me to being willing to share my stuff was transformational. I have journals from high school that I’d die if anyone ever read them. Teen angst dripping from poorly constructed poetry. I wrote academically for years and always found regurgitating facts settling but boring. It was a means to an end: degrees and a career.

I’ve always preferred creative over academic, though it is a hard way to put food on the table. I’ve been songwriting since I was a toddler. I wrote and performed a song for my senior class in high school. Haha. I forgot about that until just now. Music and lyrics were always my things, and poetry fit too. I wrote ad copy when my husband was in advertising. Theme songs are a pastime at our house, so every car, pet, and person has a song that goes with them that fits their personality. 

I’d wanted to write a novel from as far back as I can remember, but I truly thought it would be a memoir. I have some crazy stuff that has happened in my life that reads as fiction, so I thought that would be it. One book and done. And about the crazy that I’ve lived through.

But a decade ago, I was very ill and bedbound. I read a lot, since that was about all I could manage. The urge to write a romance novel finally took root enough that I had to follow through. The characters begged to have their stories told, so it was less about me deciding and more about characters deciding for me that I had to write.