It’s been five years now since I sold my first book to Harlequin Superromance, but the idea had been rattling around in my brain for many more. The story was about this young widow who came from England to St. Louis, Missouri with her two teenage daughters, one an asthmatic. Although she’d never had any nursing experience, she ends up working as a nurse’s aide, struggling to make enough to pay the rent. The girls are homesick and always begging to go back to England, but she’s determined to make a new start.

The idea had been rattling around for ages, because it was based on my own life. My mother was the young widow, I was the asthmatic daughter making her life miserable by constantly whining to go home. I figured it had plenty of dramatic potential, but I couldn’t seem to move beyond the part where the three of them are standing on the deck of the Queen Elizabeth watching the Statue of Liberty hove into view. And, since that was my opening scene, I knew I was kind of stuck.

Then I saw a Saturday class on how to write a romance novel. I hadn’t thought of my book as a romance, mostly because my mum had been too preoccupied with whiney teenager daughters to think about love affairs, but I decided it was worth checking out. The instructor was a guy who wrote under a female pseudonym. Romance writing was easy he assured us. Nothing to it. He churned out three or four books a year and got to write off exotic vacations and expensive meals. You just put a guy and a gal --he used those words-- in some sort of situation where they start out hating each other and end up in bed together. Well, actually not a bed. Make the love scenes steamy, he advised, and anywhere but a bed.

Okay, I was hooked. My husband and I got into a huge fight that night because he wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about my fledgling, but bound to be lucrative, romance writing career, in fact he was downright skeptical. I dropped the subject. He’d change his tune once the once the checks started rolling in and we were jetting off to Europe on the proceeds.

But back to the young widow. The instructor said it was essential that the hero and heroine meet on the very first page, so I took her off the Queen Elizabeth and put her in a hospital working as a nurse. All the patients tell her what a lovely English accent she has. I make the hero a doctor and, since I needed them to hate each other, I have him come from Northern Ireland.

Sparks soon fly. As soon as he hears her accent, he makes some snide comment about the English; she shoots back with something snotty about the Irish and they’re off. Later o, the asthmatic daughter becomes another source of conflict but they work that out and pretty soon they’re making passionate love on a hospital bed. Then I remembered that beds were out, so I moved the scene to an empty office and the top of a desk. Pretty soon they’re making love all over the place -- never the bed though-- and then he asks her to marry him so they can all start a new life together, free of Anglo-Irish conflict. The end.

Fantastic and I’d whipped it out in an afternoon. It was all I could do not to gloat. And then I decided to do a word count. Ten thousand words. That’s all? I wasn’t sure how long romance novels were supposed to be, but I had a niggling suspicion they should be longer than this. Around that time I joined RWA and, soon after, a critique group. Although I got a lot of positive feedback, no-one in the group seemed to think the Anglo-Irish thing was sufficient conflict which was pretty much the same response I got from the Harlequin editor I’d met at a conference. She suggested I read some of the books in the line I was targeting.

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