Why I Started Writing:

Good question. But according to my parents, I have always had a big imagination. I told stories before I had the ability to write them, but my writing career really started when two fourth-grade teachers told me I had a talent for writing.

 

Authors Who Have Influenced Me:

You can learn a lot about dialogue and scenes-writing from watching movies and television dramas, and as a child, I spent a lot of time engaged in both. I think my fiction writing skills were birthed more from movies and television than actual books.

With that in mind, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind and Louise Mae Alcott’s Little Women influenced me the most. Gone With the Wind made me wish I had lived in the days of hoop-skirts, and I cried when Beth died in Little Women.

I write Christian books and stories only and might be called a genre jumper because I write everything from romantic westerns, to historical novels to scary Christian Gothic novels. However, life itself influenced my future writing much more than anything else. Let me explain.

Both my father and grandfather were foremen on ranches in what some call the cattle country of South Texas, and they were real Texas cowboys. I spent part of my growing up years on a sixty-thousand-acre cattle ranch, and when I set my novels on ranches, I am writing about home.

 

Books I Have Written:

• The Rogue’s Daughter, Christian western romance, published by Zondervan, 1986. Republished by White Glove Publishing in 2016.
• For Always, Modern Day Romance, Zondervan, 1986.
• Brides and Blessings, Modern Day Romance, Love Inspired, 1999.
• The Winter Pearl, Historical Western, Love Inspired, 2004.
• Sanctuary, Historical, Tsaba House, 2007.
• The Overcomers: Christian Authors Who Conquered Learning Disabilities, Westbow Press, 2011.
• Gatehaven, Christian Gothic Historical, Creation House, 2013.
• When the Cowboy Rides Away, Christian Western, Elk Lake Publishing, 2015.
• The Secret Place, Historical, White Glove Publishing, 2016. This novel was first published with the title Sanctuary.
• Too Many Secrets, a novella, is a part of The Secret Admirer Romance Collection by nine different authors and will be published by Barbour Publishing in May 2017. 

Writing Contests My Books Have Won:

Sanctuary, published by Tsaba House, won the 2008 Gayle Wilson Award in the inspirational category and tied for first place in The Winter Rose that same year, another RWA contest for published authors.

When the Cowboy Rides Away, published by Elk Lake, won the 2016 Texas Association of Authors contest in the Christian Western category and was a finalist in the 2016 Will Rogers Medallion Awards in the Inspirational category.