THE BIG FIFTY!

Today is my fiftieth birthday! My mother said she didn't want to hear about it---that she knew now how her father had felt when he had told her he didn't want to hear about her own fiftieth birthday! *g*

In some ways, it seems as though it's taken me forever to get to this point; yet, in others, it seems as though it has happened in the blink of an eye. Do I feel half a century old? No. In fact, the only thing that has really bothered me about the entire process of aging is presbyopia. I hate not being able to read anything anymore without finding a pair of reading glasses! I have them all over my house, so I always have a pair handy---and I bemoan the fact that even laser surgery can't yet do away with presbyopia. Maybe next year.

At any rate, today, I remember what one of my journalism professors always said: that people who want to be sixteen again don't actually mean that; what they really mean is that they want to be sixteen again, knowing everything then that they know now. I believe that's probably true, except that I'd choose a slightly older age...twenty-one, I think.

I was, in fact, twenty-one when I started work on my first novel, NO GENTLE LOVE. So I've been writing now for nearly thirty years, and I know a great deal more now about the craft of writing than I did when I was first starting out. I can understand why some writers take advantage of opportunities to rewrite earlier novels. There are many things I would do differently in NO GENTLE LOVE if I were writing it now. But then, of course, it would no longer be the same book.

I'm always bemused whenever a reader says she or he has read a lot of my novels---and she or he can't believe I wrote a particular book. Since the very beginning of my career, I've always written across the board within the romance genre, everything from historicals to contemporaries, Gothics to fantasies, paranormals to time travels, and the occasional category, as well. I've written both novels and novellas. I've written books with several erotic love scenes and books with only a few sensual love scenes or no love scenes at all.

In a comment I posted on Larissa Ione's blog just a few days ago, I noted that I really only have one rule whenever I sit down to write a novel---and that's to try to write the best book I can at the time. Some novels turn out better than others, of course---but my own favorites of all the books I've ever written are not necessarily my readers' favorites, because everyone's taste is different. Some readers don't consider a novel good unless it's filled with erotic sex, for example, while others find that a real turn-off (pardon the pun *g*). Some readers love background, narrative, and description, while others only like a book if it's dialogue driven. Some readers adore alpha males, and others just think they're brutes. And so on down the long list of anything and everything that's ever been published in the romance genre.

As readers, we are lucky that over the years, there has usually been something for everyone in the romance genre; and as a writer, I've been fortunate, with some exceptions, to be able to write the novels I've wanted to write.

But today, since it's my big fifty, I'm taking the day off! *g*