The Story Behind the Story

I made the Zircon Contest my litmus test. After years as a failed horror writer, being damned with faint praise in rejections, an agent finally wrote on a form reject STOP SENDING ME ROMANCE, I DON'T HANDLE ROMANCE!

Guy's nuts, I thought. How could my story be romance if the hero was a flesh-eating monster? Then I did a little research that rocked the foundations of my writing career.

The Science Fiction Romance Newsletter, as edited by Jody Wallace, clued me in on the subgenre of paranormal romance. So I decided to use the Zircon Contest to test if that agent was right. If I could final in the Zircs, maybe I had found my niche.

I spent hours sifting through the SFR article database, analyzing their reviews and testing out some of the featured authors. I knew I wanted to keep my suspenseful style and elements of supernatural horror, no matter what genre I decided to write. And I wanted to come up with a new twist on the mega-popular vampire character. Armed with those two goals, and the knowledge gained from SFR, I sat down to write.

"Attraction of Otherness" is the result. The story won me 2nd place in the Zircons, a stint at the helm of SFR (which is now Speculative Romance Online) and a great friend and ally in Jody Wallace.

Oh, and a much more successful career so far.

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