Cathy Yardley

I didn't plan to be a writer. But, like the quote says -- if you want to be a writer, try being anything else. My life is a portrait of all the "anything elses" before I came to my senses.

I graduated from U.C. Berkeley with a double major in Art History and Mass Communications. I moved to L.A. with the full intention of figuring out what job I wanted to do, doing it until I could retire, and only then seriously considering writing a novel. Why? Because real people didn't write books for a living. (Stephen King , Nora Roberts, John Grisham, Tom Clancy,  they're not real people. In fact, I don't think they're human. Haven't you wondered?)

http://www.cathyyardley.com/


So I tried real jobs. Advertising assistant (read: slave), ad sales assistant, project manager, product marketing manger. Still kept plunking away every now and then at novels, although I'd hit chapter seven and stop cold on every single one of them. I hung out with writers. I joined writing organizations with the rationalization that I'd become a publicist for authors... I wasn't going to be, you know, a writer. God forbid!

I was so incredibly clueless, it was funny.

I became president of the Los Angeles Chapter of Romance Writers of America when I was 23, and did more than I ever thought I would to get our members involved. We had a writing contest that was short of entries. To encourage participation and to make sure we had enough, I turned in some of my own writing. I wound up winning first prize in the area I entered.

Hmmm, I thought. Might be on to something here.

I finished the book two years later, and queried Silhouette books. Two months later, I was rejected, but by that point I was enlightened. I worked on another book. Took me a year, but I finished it� and all hell broke loose. I was a writer, not a cubicle-worker! I quit my job, moved from L.A. to the S.F. Bay Area, and embraced the process of Being a Writer.
Then promptly went broke, and got another day job.

Three months after this momentous occurrence, however, I got The Call from Harlequin, selling my first book, "The Cinderella Solution". And everything else in my life went into focus. I'd always been a writer. I was just finally getting paid for it! Now, I'm working on my fifth book in four years, writing for Harlequin, Red Dress Ink, and New American Library.

And now that I'm a writer, I can't imagine being anything else�