I’m a fifth generation rural westerner. The more time I spend in an urban area, the more I appreciate the sticks. I like red meat, endurance sports and math. I’m a recovering lawyer. Reading and writing romance is greatly helping with the recovery.

I write romantic suspense. As of yet, I am unpublished. I like to take ordinary women and put them in extraordinary situations. I’m not a fixer myself so I don’t create seriously screwed up heroes. These guys aren’t perfect, though. That would be too boring.

How did I end up doing this? I come from a family of voracious readers and grew up in a house filled with books. By the end of third grade I had read every horse story in my school’s library and the public library. Both of those libraries happened to be on the same block in my very small hometown.

I moved on to mysteries. It started with Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and the Three Investigators. By sixth grade, I began to raid my maternal grandmother’s extensive library. It contained nearly every Agatha Christie, Nero Wolfe and Lord Peter Wimsey story ever published. One day in junior high my paternal grandmother brought me a large plastic garbage bag filled with Harlequins. I was hooked.

I’m not sure when romantic suspense evolved into its own genre, but I first discovered it in the form of Harlequin Intrigues at the Borders three blocks from my law school. My two favorite genres rolled into one. I couldn’t get enough. I would surreptitiously peruse the display, make my selection and hope not to get spotted by a classmate before my purchase was safely hidden in a bag.

Those Harlequin Intrigues helped me get through law school. They were also the escape that helped me survive many years of practicing law. I was barely through my first year as an associate when I began to toy with the idea of a permanent escape by writing romantic suspense. I slogged through another decade of the law. A story was percolating in the back of my mind. I started writing it.

I’m no longer practicing law. I write about it for a media company by day, and I write romantic suspense by night. I finished the first book. I thought it was fantastic. I’ve since learned a great deal more about the craft and realize that first book wasn’t as great as I thought, but there’s a good story there, and it will get out. A second and a third are underway.