I’ve always said: Some things are meant to be, and some things are meant to be great stories.
The question most recently posed to the lagoon was this: When did you decide to write romance?
A great question, but one I wasn’t sure how to answer. Because my answer is: always.
My first true love was poetry. As a child, I loved Ogden Nash and Gelett Burgess and Lewis Carroll. My Greek grandmother sang songs to us, recited nursery rhymes, and even wrote a few poems herself. My French grandmother had a few books in her meager library, including Favorite Poems, Old and New and The Collected Poems of Rudyard Kipling. And Shakespeare! Who could forget Shakespeare?
I loved the words and the rhymes. I loved the verbal trickery and subversive turns of phrase. I loved that so much could be conveyed with so little. And I loved that poets LOVED, people, places and things, unabashedly and beautifully, for all the world to see. Poe pined for Annabelle Lee. The Highwayman loved Bess, the landlord’s daughter. Romeo loved Juliet.
I wrote scads of poetry. Reams. Boatloads. To everyone and everything, real and imaginary. I was a True Romantic. I was one hundred percent positive that, one day, the universe would introduce me to my own soul’s mate.
Sure, I had boyfriends, but I did not seek out Great Love. One does not seek Great Love. Great Love finds you. I had my heart broken again…and again…and again…and again…and again…and then I looked in the mirror and realized I wasn’t a little girl anymore, and I wondered what happened.
I was alone.
But not truly alone.
My Great Loves are my friends. My tribe. My teddy bear. All the people that the universe paired me with in the strangest of circumstances. All the adventures I take. All these people and places and things I get to keep in my heart forever.
That soulmate, that invisible half that was supposed to make me whole…that’s who I write about in every story. Every book. Every poem.
Because some of us were meant to be…and some of us were meant to tell great stories!