Accidental romance author

I am not a romance author. Not by nature, anyway. I am a fantasy/sci-fi geek and have been writing such since high school. Emma Scott isn't even my real name. It's an identity for this strange person living in my brain--the one who demands a good romantic interest in every book she reads, regardless of genre. It's the name I've given to the sappy entity who saw a lapse in the endless fantasy saga I'd been working on for years and pounced. It happened to be a November, the National Novel Writing Month, and since I CANNOT resist NaNoWriMo, the Story of Us was born.

It began as a prompt in my favorite writing competition, the NYC Midnight Madness Creative Writing contest. I'm not pimping them, but for the curious: http://www.nycmidnight.com/  

They provide three prompts, you have 48 hours to write a 1000 word story. I got romance/computer lab/glow stick. The computer lab and the glow stick didn't make it into the novel, but I turned that flash story into a full-on book for NaNoWriMo. This was in 2009, a book so old one character's parents were named Kristoff and Ana. (Of course, I had to change the names but it was tough; I rather liked them. But sometimes you just have to let it go.) I know, I know...

It languished until a few months ago when my nautical fantasy grew too unwieldy and needed a break. Or rather, I needed a break from it before I went cross-eyed. So I opened up the file, dusted it off, and cleaned it up. I toyed querying agents but this thing was never meant to be anything more than fun, and there's nothing LESS fun than having strangers poo-poo something that you really just want to feel good about. So I'm drop-kicking this little novel, that I've grown extremely fond of, into the ether and I hope y'all like it. I do. So much so that I'm going to write another romance. 

NaNoWriMo's coming up, after all. ;) 

~E