This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Darynda Jones is the author of the Darklight and Charley Davidson paranormal romance series. The 5th novel in the Charley Davidson series, Fifth Grave Past the Light, was released in July. Here, she tells us why A Rose in Winter by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss was the inspiration behind her desire to write romance.
While I’ve been making up stories since before I could write, I never knew I wanted to BE a writer until I read a condensed version of Kathleen E. Woodiwiss’s A Rose in Winter when I was sixteen. I read the actual book the next day and I’ve been hooked on romance, and the idea of writing romance, ever since. Miss Woodiwiss sparked a fire in me that I never knew existed. I’d always loved writing, craved it, in fact, like others crave coffee or sunshine, but it was at that moment that I knew I wanted to actually be a writer.
Even then, however, the gremlins of doubt had their claws in me. I could write short stories and songs and poems and plays, but I wasn’t smart enough to write an entire book. Only smart people wrote books. I’d never be able to do that. But that didn’t stop me from trying. I started my first manuscript in high school, sitting in a corner booth at the local Tastee Freeze for hours with my BFF. She was writing a sequel to Escape from New York (we were big Kurt Russell fans). I was writing the equivalent of The Warriors in a post-apocalyptic underground fallout facility, where four teenage boys, who bore strong resemblances to the members of Van Halen, were on the run for their lives through the lower tunnels of the facility.
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If Kathleen were alive today, I’d send her a dozen roses. Or an edible bouquet. Or on an all-expense-paid vacation to Switzerland. I owe her so much.