When I was at high school I always wanted to be the sweet girl. You know, a bit like Sandy in Grease … or like Samantha in Sixteen Candles. But that was not to be … I was always the academic one. While everyone else seemed to have all the fun, I was the serious one lost in my own world of making up stories all with happily ever afters.

I lived in a city but I always dreamed of living by the water. Being a Cancerian, water is my element and as I wrote my stories, water always inspired my creativity. I loved that scene in Grease where Sandy and Danny got together at the beach, just like From Here to Eternity. So I read sweet romances, dreamed of holidays by the ocean… and watched those boys.

On to university and sitting in lectures, my head was still full of sweet romance stories and not the heavy going stuff I was studying in English literature. I studied the period called the Romantic era which was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement. Was it this study that instilled a love of romance in me… to appear later in life in my published category romances…or was it the reading of my mother’s romance novels throughout my teenage years that inspired my desire to write of sweet romance?

Don’t get me wrong, I loved reading the classics and more literary works and I did write a brilliant thesis on stream of consciousness. But when I wasn’t studying I would read any sweet romance I could get my hands on.

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