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AMOUNG B.C.'S OTHER SUCCESSFUL Romance writers are Carolyn Jantz, Bobby Hutchinson, Christine Hella Cott, Kay Gregory, Jo Manning, Elizabeth Graham and Sandra McDonell (aka Sandra K. Rhoades). Almost all had to struggle to make it.
A marathon runner and a mother of five, Hutchinson, born in Elk Valley, B.C., initially pursued a career as a freelance writer but was dissatisfied with the low pay.
"Then I blundered onto a TV show which interviewed Janet Dailey, one of romance's leading writers. By God, she made money," she recalls.
Hutchinson read 150 romances before she wrote and published Sheltering Bridges, a set-in-B.C. story about a Kootenay mining magnate, his deaf son and a virtuous tutor on a ranch near Fernie.
Her second romance, Wherever You Go, was a tribute to Vancouver as a city. "It had scenes in all my favourite places the Varsity Grill, the Only Seafood cafe, behind the Museum of Anthropology, Schwartz' Deli near the Army & Navy, Spanish Banks. 'Then Harlequin phoned. They loved it. But could I change the setting to Seattle? Margaret Laurence would have hung up the phone in their ear. But I sacrificed True Art to Mammon.
Richmond novelist Kay Gregory's success should inspire struggling writers everywhere. Gregory's writing career began more than 20 years ago with a creative writing course at UBC.
She credits part of her eventual success to an influential course she took five years ago from local writing instructor Basil Jackson. "I thought I was writing suspense!" she recalls, 'Then an editor at Berkeley-Jove sent back a manuscript with a note suggesting I try their romance line, Second Chance at Love.'
Gregory's fourth manuscript and first book, A Star for a Ring, was published in 1987 by Mills & Boon, the British giant of romance fiction that views an estimated 5,000 unsolicited manuscripts per year. The novel came to North America as a Harlequin Romance in 1988 and has appeared in Holland, Australia and elsewhere.
In just two years Gregory has had seven books accepted, her eighth is finished, and her ninth is underway.
[Summer/BCBW 1989]
A marathon runner and a mother of five, Hutchinson, born in Elk Valley, B.C., initially pursued a career as a freelance writer but was dissatisfied with the low pay.
"Then I blundered onto a TV show which interviewed Janet Dailey, one of romance's leading writers. By God, she made money," she recalls.
Hutchinson read 150 romances before she wrote and published Sheltering Bridges, a set-in-B.C. story about a Kootenay mining magnate, his deaf son and a virtuous tutor on a ranch near Fernie.
Her second romance, Wherever You Go, was a tribute to Vancouver as a city. "It had scenes in all my favourite places the Varsity Grill, the Only Seafood cafe, behind the Museum of Anthropology, Schwartz' Deli near the Army & Navy, Spanish Banks. 'Then Harlequin phoned. They loved it. But could I change the setting to Seattle? Margaret Laurence would have hung up the phone in their ear. But I sacrificed True Art to Mammon.
Richmond novelist Kay Gregory's success should inspire struggling writers everywhere. Gregory's writing career began more than 20 years ago with a creative writing course at UBC.
She credits part of her eventual success to an influential course she took five years ago from local writing instructor Basil Jackson. "I thought I was writing suspense!" she recalls, 'Then an editor at Berkeley-Jove sent back a manuscript with a note suggesting I try their romance line, Second Chance at Love.'
Gregory's fourth manuscript and first book, A Star for a Ring, was published in 1987 by Mills & Boon, the British giant of romance fiction that views an estimated 5,000 unsolicited manuscripts per year. The novel came to North America as a Harlequin Romance in 1988 and has appeared in Holland, Australia and elsewhere.
In just two years Gregory has had seven books accepted, her eighth is finished, and her ninth is underway.
[Summer/BCBW 1989]
Submitted on February 5, 2004 in By David.
