My desk has been described as organized chaos. I am pretty much the only one who knows my filing system and therefore the only one who can find something. The desk itself was custom built for my height and because I have recurring back problems, but it was also built to fill the length of one wall, roughly sixteen feet; with three banks of deep drawers. When I moved and had to downsize, my search for a new house included space for my desk and the matching wall unit of bookshelves which is also sixteen feet by nine feet. I found a house that gave me the space I needed to set up my office again, but now I have no dining room and the desk had to be shortened by three feet *s*

I was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario. My parents moved us out of the city and into the suburbs when I was six years old so I have never been one for crowded cities and busy streets. Each time the area began to expand with houses and busy traffic, I have moved further and further north out of the greater Toronto area. I currently live in a small town which fits the cliche, if you blink you miss it, but I can still go for a short walk and see horses in the fields and chickens in back yards. Writing is a solitary business and, for me, at any rate, distractions too easily pull me out of the mood to write. Living away from hustle and bustle always helped focus me, and it was not unusual for me to work sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. I recall being invited out for dinner to a friend's house...and resenting the need to leave my medieval characters halfway into a battle. But the hubby prevailed and I went. When I arrived everyone was sitting in the family room glued to the TV watching in dead silence as the cameras were following a white Bronco on the freeway. Twelve pairs of eyes stared at me in disbelief when I asked what was going on. Yeah. That's how isolated a writer can be.

I started writing in my mid twenties. Purely by accident. I'd not had any burning desire to become a writer or a journalist, but I did read a lot, mostly crime and mystery novels. One of my neighbours used to buy a certain brand of detergent all the time because it came with a romance novel packed inside. She asked me if I had ever read one and I said no, so she loaned me her latest acquisition. To this day I can't remember the title, but it was about a woman driving along the highway somewhere in Texas and stopping when she sees a stranded calf on the road. For some unfathomable reason she put the calf in her car and when she pulled into a motel for the night, she got into an argument with the manager about keeping the calf in her room as a pet. That was about as far as I got into the book before I gave it back and told my neighbour what I thought of it. She said, well, if you think you can do better, write one yourself. And that was the beginning. It took me six years and four unpubbed manuscripts before I finally won the interest of an editor and the rest, as they say, is history.

I actually have three on the go, all completely different, all in various stages. I'm waiting for the bell to go off in my head for one of them to surge ahead of the others. So far it looks like another medieval has nosed into the lead. I love the time period, love everything romantic about knights in armor, dark forests, gloomy castles, and damsels in distress. Right now the working title is Mark of the Rose.

Smashwords was one of the first places I went to self publish. The fact Smashwords distributes to Kobo and Nook and Apple along with several other outlets means I upload it once and it fans out like a wave to other sellers. I have never had any problem with the much-feared meat grinder turning my .doc into other forms. And any time I've had a question or problem, Mark Coker has personally replied to my emails. The annual sales are great. The updates and news keep us informed of changes in the publishing world. And the dashboard is clear and easy to use, to track sales, to offer coupons for sales and promotions. I probably shouldn't say this, but I was at a conference a while back and listened to enthusiastic support for another digital publisher/distributor along the same lines as Smashwords, and out of curiosity, I tried uploading my latest project with them. After SEVEN attempts to upload the .doc, and SEVEN attempts to figure out how to add something as simple as a double space between paragraphs, I gave up and deleted my account and took it happily to Smashwords.

I had a very long and not so lucrative career in print as a midlist author. Back when there were financial crises going on in the publishing world, we midlist authors were the first to find ourselves cut adrift so the publishers could ante up the bazillions needed to buy sure-fire NYTimes big name authors. The house I worked for, Dell, for over ten years cut me along with a few dozen other good and loyal authors. I had luck being picked up by another house for a couple of books, but then the rules started changing. They started telling me what I should write, how long the book should be, how I should cut back on the battles and bloodshed, and how I should consult a list of acceptable themes since no one read pirate novels anymore. Hmmm. By that time I had two lovely grandchildren I adored and I decided I didn't want to miss watching them grow up the same way I had missed a good deal of my son's younger years. I told my agent I was retiring with my dignity intact (yes, he argued, but he knew better than to try to change my mind) and for the next eight years, I was a 24/7 Grammy and loved every minute of it. But...along came an unexpected and ugly divorce and there I was with a massive big house and no income. I had alimony for three years, but after that...nada. The royalties had all played out on most of my print titles, but even those that were still earning only paid me every six months. I often thought editors and publishers should get paid every six months to see how they would cope, but that's another subject. One of my author buddies, Julie Ortolon, started talking about digital books, and asked me if I had the rights back to any of my books. As it happened, I had three books published very early on with Avon and the rights had been returned a few years before. I thought, what the heck, worth a shot, so I started with China Rose, my first book. I retyped the entire book, since there were no discs or electronic copies, and was able to revise it to reflect the changes in my style over twenty years. When I finished that, I tackled Bound by the Heart, retyping and revising, then The Wind and the Sea. I called my agent to inquire about getting the rights back to my other books and...because this was before ebooks really exploded...he just sort of sloughed me off asking why would want them, they had no resale value. Hah. Fine. I wrote to Dell and NAL myself and within a few months had all the rights back to all of my books, included the ones that were still earning through print sales. But I guess they thought the same way as my agent...what could I do with them? Who would want them? Double Hah! Within twelve months I had all of them converted to digital and was earning a 60-70% royalty on each sale as opposed to 8-10% for print. Can you spell motivation? *s*

My fans mean everything to me. I have been called a dinosaur, my writing has been called old fashioned because it is heavily laden with research and history. I write bloody battles in time periods where bloody battles existed. I write as realistically as possible in every time period because really, I have yet to imagine the probability of a pirate captain looking over a young, beautiful captive and thinking to himself: I will win her over with my charm. Yes, I am overly descriptive at times, and yes, I tend to kill off main characters if the story calls for it, and yes I get grief from some reviewers. But I also get kudos from others who appreciate the hard work that goes into writing a book in such a way that it plays out like a movie where the reader can see and smell and feel the heat of a cannon being fired. My day is always brighter when I get an email from a reader, even when they yell at me for writing so slowly *G*

I tend to read anything outside my own genre. I have always stayed away from reading romance, either contemporary or historical, just so nothing influences what I write. My favorite authors would have to be crime writers like Michael Connelly, John Sandford, Lee Childs. I have all of Winston Churchill's great huge volumes on my Kindle but confess I've been a bit intimidated about starting them. Ditto with the Game of Throne books. Clive Cussler, Robert Ludlum, even some John Grisham have made it to my auto-buy lists. My three favorite books of all time are Gone With the Wind, Mila 18, and Auntie Mame.

I have a few hobbies, when I'm not writing. I love working with stained glass and have a workshop in my basement. I've done it for years, even when I was writing 24/7. I found the cutting, grinding, foiling, and leading a panel very relaxing and helped me work out plot twists. I also crochet and search for increasingly more challenging patterns, some of which can be seen in my photo album on facebook. I found, especially after having a knee replaced, that I'm not as active as I once was and my metabolism seems to get slower and slower every year. So keeping my hands busy with yarn and hooks at night keeps my fingers out of the potato chip bag *G*

I mostly go on recommendations. Friends know what I like to read, so if they come across a good book they pass the title along. Last fall I travelled to Europe on a bucket list trip and one of the most amazing stops was in Florence, where I saw Michaelangelo's David. I bought and devoured about a dozen ebooks about the sculptor and his life, and yes, ideas were swirling around in my head when I was finished.

The very first story I wrote that gained attention was in grade eleven. We had an English teacher who fancied herself a dramatic poet and reader of avant garde works. She gave the class an assignment to write a descriptive two page story... I can't even remember the official topic... but I wrote two pages on the moon fading and the sun rising that made it sound like a sexual awakening. She mortified the crap out of me by reading it out loud and announced it was the first A++ she ever handed out.