I wrote my first novel at age 11. It was about a sorceress who had to defeat a devilishly good-looking evil wizard, and it was pretty much a copy of Ursula LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, with added romance. I followed that up by plagiarising The Dark is Rising, The Diary of Anne Frank, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

They were all terrible.

I spent most of my free time at the library in Rumford, Maine, reading everything I could get my hands on. I got a part-time job there as a teenager and used to sneak romance novels into the biography section and read them while I was pretending to be shelving books.

As I matured, my stories got more original. My best friend Kathy and I spent all of our study halls and most of our chemistry lessons scribbling stories about ourselves and various celebrities. My oeuvre was rapidly expanded to include The Beatles Book, The Monkees Book, The Gorgeous Neighbour Possessed By The Devil Book, and The Vampire Book.

Unlike my early work, I look back on these co-written novels with great pride.

I studied at Brown University, earning a summa cum laude degree with honours in English. I became a peer writing tutor and drew a weekly cartoon for the Brown Daily Herald entitled “Georgie and Squid,” about an Elvis lookalike with a pet cephalopod.

During my junior year abroad at New Hall College, Cambridge University, I fell in love with the United Kingdom. I moved there in 1992 to pursue a postgraduate degree in English literature at the University of Reading. My M.Phil. thesis was a study of fairies in late nineteenth and early twentieth century children’s fiction.

After finding a career as a secondary school English teacher, I started writing humorous, sexy women’s fiction and romance. I mostly wrote at night, after I’d finished my marking, but occasionally I’d sneak in a bit of writing while my students were taking an exam. My first three novels were all rejected, some of them several times. The fourth one (eventually called Featured Attraction) was a 2004 short contemporary Golden Heart finalist, and I sold that one. It was one of the most memorable days in my life when the editor from Harlequin rang me to tell me they were going to buy my book. I do believe I screamed in joy.

Since then, I’ve written several novels for Harlequin Mills & Boon (one of which, Driving Him Wild, was shortlisted for the 2008 Romantic Novelists’ Association Romance Prize). I’ve also written several single-title romantic novels for Headline’s Little Black Dress imprint. And at times I masquerade as half of B.H. Dark, who writes erotic comedy for Samhain Publishing. My latest project is writing standalone women’s commercial fiction novels for Headline Review, the first novel, The Bad Twin, to be published in 2010.

I give workshops for fiction writers all over the UK and the US, most notoriously on how to write a sex scene. I belong to the Romantic Novelists’ Association in the UK, and Romance Writers of America. I still read everything I can get my hands on, though I don’t hide it any more.

I live in Berkshire, England, with my husband, a guitar tech for rock bands, and our young son, who likes to read, drum on things, and eat random objects off the floor. I recently resigned from my teaching job to be a full-time writer and mum. I’m teased daily about my American accent, and wouldn’t mind having a gorgeous neighbour possessed by the devil.

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