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Up to this point, I was reading and writing mostly fantasy fiction—think Lord of the Rings. I loved romantic subplots, but it took me awhile to come around to reading romance novels. During my undergraduate years, I picked up two or three historical romances, giggled a little at the euphemisms for male and female genitalia (this was in the hay day of the purple prose), but realized I loved romance in my stories. And let’s be honest, I liked the sex on the page. Most fantasy novels closed the door, which was just irritating when you wanted to know more about how those characters interacted.

The problem was, most of the subgenres of romance were of only mild interest to me. Historicals were nice, especially pirates (yes, I was a pirate girl), but in general, not really my cup of tea. I wanted that romance, that sex and passion, woven into my fantasy stories.

At the time, though, no one was writing that kind of novel. Now, you’d think this would encourage me to take the plunge. It didn’t at first. I was too tied into the established genres to know I could bust them a little. I moved back to Las Vegas from Hawaii a few months after graduation and ended up working at the Natural History Museum as the “Shark Lady”. This job turned out to be fortuitous for several reasons, not the least of which was that I meet a woman who was crazy about romance novels. She read them in the hundreds, re-read her favorites and was an expert on the genre. When I told her I liked romances all right, but wasn’t finding the adventure, fantasy stories I wanted, she pointed me to two early futuristics.

I didn’t love them, they didn’t quite meet my world building expectations. But I did realize there was room in the romance genre for those types of books. I could write the book I wanted to read! (It seemed such a novel idea at the time.) And so I started my very first novel, a fantasy romance that is still unpublished, but it spawned two other books that have since been published.

At the time, there wasn’t a particular place to publish fantasy romance, but that didn’t deter me. I figured there were other people like me who’d want to read this kind of book so I’d write it and then find a place to publish it. In the meantime, I started sending out a few more short story submissions. Not consistently at first. Just one here and one there. My second ever submission actually came close to be accepted—it was under consideration but then ultimately rejected for being too similar to another story the magazine had just bought. That kind of rejection, though, was enough to really get me going. I started submitting short stories regularly even as I worked on my novel. And I built up a very respectable pile of rejections.

By the time I’d finished that first novel, I was living in Germany and the Internet had become an indispensable part of my day. I found other people who liked the kind of cross-genre romance I did, I was able to investigate publishers easier, and I started sending out my novel even as I went to work on the next. For a year and a half, I lived in Germany, traveled a bit, and wrote. I wrote every evening, developing a habit that allowed me to finish three novels and several short stories in that time period. And I came to realize just how much I loved writing. I never got bored! Everything else I ever did—yes, even working with dolphins—got boring after a while. But writing didn’t. Writing was always new and challenging, frustrating and exciting. I still wasn’t getting published, but I definitely felt like a real writer.

By the time I moved to Ireland for my post-graduate degree—back to being a scientist—fantasy, science fiction and paranormal romance was just starting to make some inroads in publishing. But there still wasn’t much of a market for what I wrote. Most New York houses just weren’t willing to take the chance yet.

And then along came electronic publishing…