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   I love the dash and verve of the Regency period. Sandwiched between the Georgian and Victorian periods it has provided fodder for so many brilliant writers from Jane Austen to Georgette Heyer right up to the talented crop of writers today. Today, the Regency Period is the setting for my three published books, though pre-published, I wrote in many different time periods.

        At the age of seven I self-published a series of linked tales about a school for witches. During family holidays at Dandeloo, our beach cottage in Coffin Bay, South Australia, I’d gather my parents and two younger sisters around the dinner table for regular readings of the dastardly dealings of my seven-year-old heroine and her fellow miscreants. With no television, reading and endless games of ‘Beetle’ were the family’s main evening recreations.

     My early adolescence was dominated by my Medieval phase. I devoured books about life in castles as background for the sagas I wrote about my crisis-ridden Cavanaugh Family.

        Crinolines and corsets had replaced hair shirts by the time I was twenty.

    When my life took an unexpected turn several years later, I wrote contemporary romances set in the Okavango Delta. The pristine environment, the wildlife and the people there offered so much potential for so many wonderful stories full of love and adventure. I also needed diversion.

     After a whirlwind romance, Botswana was my new home. My fiance’s cottage was in the middle of a Mopane fores

t on the Thamalakane River, 10kms out of town. We had no phone (or hot water) and when I wanted company I’d walk 2kms across a flood plain and hitch a ride on the newly tarred Francistown-Maun road into town. During the day while Eivind was flying I wrote stories. In the evening I battled with a two-ring gas burner balanced on a cardboard box trying to recreate the recipes from my specially acquired “Australian Women’s Weekly Cooking for Two”.

   Later, when I worked as an airborne geophysical survey operator, sometimes the only female on crews in remote locations for two to three months, writing was my chief recreation.

   By this stage I was thoroughly immersed in the Regency.

   During the day I operated the computer equipment in the back of CASA 212s and Cessna 404s flying low level over the steaming jungle of French Guyana, or Greenland’s ice cap. In the evening I wrote passionate adventures set during the Napoleonic wars. I worked with many wonderful people, but when Eivind wasn’t working on the same contract my writing became an even more important way to amuse myself.

    For many years, I wrote, submitted, and was rejected.

   Finally, more than twenty years after I wrote my first book as a teenager, UK publisher Robert Hale accepted my fifth single title historical manuscript, Lady Sarah’s Redemption.

     Lady Sarah’s Redemption is very close to my heart. I wrote it when Eivind was away for four months flying in Antarctica and I was pregnant with our second daughter. Without the household hero I was lonely so transferred my need for excitement and passion onto the page.

     Shortly after Eivind returned, and four weeks before Lillie’s birth, he broke his back while we were renovating the family’s Clare Valley Bed & Breakfast property, Wuthering Heights, in South Australia.

       Eivind was in rehabilitation for five weeks, barely able to function through the pain.

              I needed a happy ending.

          So I gave Sarah and Roland theirs and Lady Sarah’s Redemption came to life and found a publisher.

        Fortunately Eivind was able to walk again and after five years the  pain is no longer a regular part of life. Like me, he’s one of the lucky ones,  able to say that his hobby is his job. He flies the majestic 777 and is hot-wired for the 21st century while I have one foot in the nineteenth. But isn’t that what romance is all about?