That’s how it all came about and how it all evolved. I have generally had fun writing and I’ve made a lot of friends in the States because I used to travel there at least once, sometimes twice a year, for either the conferences or for retreats or book tours for a while when book tours were a thing.
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It helped to be writing them very quickly one after the other because it was a continuous storyline. I’ve generally written about two a year, but occasionally that goes up to three and sometimes it has been four, which was a lot but those were some of the quartets I did. Subsequently I sold all my books to the Americans, and I have continued doing that ever since. Their books are longer, and it enabled me to write a bigger story, so that’s what I did. I switched to writing for the American market which is a little bit different. What are you going to do with it? I kept writing. So, I did retire from science and then of course you open a door, and you have extra time. In 1993 I decided to retire from science, not because of the writing or because I thought I’d have a life writing, but because it was getting too stressful. Then I just continued to write more or less to amuse myself more than anything, and they kept taking the books.
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So, they let me fix it, and that was my first book. They came back and said, there’s this and this and this that’s not quite right and I said, let me have a try at fixing it. She pointed to the back of a Mills & Boon romance and said, you could send it to them. It was my mother who told me, send it here. I read it over again and I thought, this is not bad, and so I started to write around, to find out where to send it. A hard beginning in Regency romanceīut, lo and behold, I found that because I wanted to find out what happened I got to the end of the book, so I actually wrote a book. I always have projects lying around for literally years, incomplete. I assumed that I would never get to the end because you know how you start projects. I had already gone through a lot of the libraries and what Regency romances they stocked, and so in order to keep myself occupied I started writing one.
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After I put the kids to sleep, I would read.Īt that time in Australia there were only two Regency romances brought in a month by Mills & Boon and that was nowhere near enough. It was all very, very dry as you can imagine, so I liked to be able to read at night. At that time, back in the late 80’s, it was 1989, I used to read Regency romances because I was working as a scientist and writing scientific grants and reviewing scientific grants and papers and stuff like that. I got into writing romances because I literally ran out of Regency romances to read. Give us a little bit of a helicopter view of all of those years. You have an international army of fans, so tell me about how you got into this career. You have been working since the early 90’s, you’ve got more than 80 books now published and many accolades including landing in the top 100 Romance of the Year many times. Jenny Wheeler: I am in awe or of having the chance to talk to you because you are one of the legends of romance publishing.