I hated reading as a kid. The books were boring and I just refused to do it and it was driving my mother insane. So she made the executive decision to bribe me with romance novels. She’d paperclip the naughty parts and tell me to skip over them, and I was such a goodie-goodie I did.
Some of the first characters I fell head over heels for, and who felt so real to me, were from Jude Deveraux.
She had the Montgomery family and their stories spanned probably several hundred years, but the ones that stand out to me now are about the old Highland castles and sexy lairds to more modern times in the American West.
I had so much fun reading those books over and over, and I can remember being stretched out on my bed as a teenager deciding that when I wrote a book, the last name I used would be Montgomery. If I could’ve jumped into a world and became part of their family it would’ve been that one.
I read those books so often that when my mother first learned I’d written a book, her first guess was that I’d written one of those old Highland, sweep her off her feet love stories.
Nope.
I might’ve loved those guys but my imagination took that passion and love in a little bit of a different direction.
SHARE IN THE COMMENTS: What kind of books did you first fall in love with? Who were you first obsessed with as a reader?