I can trace my love of writing to my award-winning story in the sixth grade, "Hermes and his Magical Shoes", a Greek mythology we were required to write which not only showed my early love of words, but my early love of writing. My award? The highest grade in the entire sixth grade and my teacher calling my mother and telling her, "Your daughter has a gift".
The fact Hermes' shoes gave him his magical powers, showed my early obsession with shoes. Both writing and shoes are still my obsessions to this day.
In high school, my friends relied on me to write their significant others' either love letters or break-up notes. My romance trend was beginning.
I found out years later, my yearning to be a writer came to me naturally. My maternal grandmother, Rosie, wrote movie scripts in the 1930s and 1940s. She would take the train from Detroit to New York, my young mother in tow, and walk right into movie studios with her scripts. I adored grandma Rosie and vowed if the day came I ever got out of my comfort zone and entered this arena of romance writing, I would use the nom de plume Rosie used - Houseman. No one knows how she chose it, but I kept my promise.
Writing is quite the journey - there is nothing else quite like it. It can be frustrating, lonely, wonderful, life-affirming and often, all at the same time. Of all the careers I have done in my life, from selling couture clothing to psychotherapy, nothing has given me the satisfaction like writing. It's in my blood. The saying is true, "I can't NOT write". Yup, a double-negative! Above all, writing is magical. Creating an entire world - a world that lives in my imagination - has an ethereal quality unlike anything else I have ever done.
When I disengage my computer from my fingers, I love photography, dance, the beach, of course reading romance, and, most of all, spending as much time as possible with my fabulously supportive husband, two growing boys, and four rescue dogs. Rescues are the best and I whole-heartedly support rescue organizations.
While it took taking care of my mom when she had Alzheimer's to realize how we have to really and truly follow our bliss for me to put words to paper, one of the many wonderful things about writing is that it is never too late.