Ten Fast Facts

1. Wherever I am, I'd rather be on a cruise ship, and I hate the water.

2. I taught myself HTML language just for fun.

3. I've been married eighteen years longer than the national average.

4. I hate spiders, but I love snakes.

5. When I was eight years old, I taught myself the American Sign Language alphabet from a card I found lying on Galveston Beach.

6. I've made twelve Halloween costumes for my daughter, and I still can't sew.

7. I've never seen a single episode of Lost, Survivor, CSI, the Bachelor, Sex and the City, or the Simpsons. I am, however, a 24 junkie.

8. I own 54 books on the craft of writing.

9. When I was a teenager, I saw the movie Billy Jack seventeen times.

10. I was once hired to be a roustabout on an oil rig.

From the time I was twelve years old to the time I went to college, I spent a majority of my time on horseback, traveling to horse shows all over Oklahoma and Texas.

I was taking college prep courses to become a veterinarian, only to be told by my high school counselor that veterinary medicine was "a difficult field for a woman" (can you imagine that?) and I should set my sights on something else. But, she said, I had shown some talent for writing. Maybe I could pursue something in that field? Because my assertiveness didn't come until later in life, I didn't tell that counselor to stuff it. Instead, I ended up in the Professional Writing program at the University of Oklahoma.

I graduated from college, but I didn't write again for fifteen years. I did, however, meet the love of my life and got married.

Brian's personality is so different from mine that the priest who married us had reservations about doing it. My husband is a quiet, reserved engineer who never met a detail he didn't like, and I'm a life-of-the-party type who can barely remember to get out of bed in the morning. But we stubbornly ignored the priest's reservations and got married, anyway.

In this photo, our daughter is about four years old. I have no idea how old Big Bird is. I also have no idea why I thought that hairstyle was attractive and why my husband had that caterpillar sitting on his upper lip.

This is a photo from a trip we took to Disney World when our daughter was in junior high. She was growing into a truly beautiful young woman. Brian had lost the hairy lip. I, however, still had the horrible hair.

It was about this time that we got our first computer--a used PC-XT we bought from a guy out of his garage. I could actually store words, so I was getting the burn to write again.

In 1999, I sold my first book to Harlequin. In the next few months, I sold four more. It was starting to look as if my high school counselor had actually set me on the right path, even if it was for all the wrong reasons.

Our daughter just graduated from Texas Women's University with an M.B.A. and a Masters of Health Sector Management.

I just finished my sixteenth book--a romantic comedy titled Tall Tales and Wedding Veils, about two people who fall in love in spite of the fact that they're total opposites.

Speaking of total opposites, remember the guy I married who the priest thought maybe I shouldn't? This photo was taken on the Caribbean cruise we took this past spring for our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Believe it or not, things have worked out pretty well. We're thinking we'll go ahead and stick it out for another twenty five years before we address the possibility that maybe we made a really big mistake.