"I'm a man you sleep with, not fall in love with."
Jake Vance was danger in a designer suit, a charming corporate raider. When he set his sights on Blackstone's, Australia's richest diamond dealers, Holly McLeod's primary assignment was as his assistant; her secondary was as a spy. To her amazement, she learned her dangerously sexy boss was the long-lost Blackstone heir. And then Jake did the unthinkable: To save his new company, he proposed marriage...an intimate one...to her!
Paula Roe traveled possibly one of the worst roads to publication. She persisted through fifteen years of what she calls "two steps forward and one step back"--encouraged by one editor only to have her leave and reassign Paula’s book to an editor who rejected it, contest wins that didn’t result in contracts and revisions that ultimately ended with the all-too-familiar rejection letter. But Paula learned from all of those experiences and kept at it; it wasn’t possible for her to stop writing and what she wrote could only be Harlequin novels.
Then, finally, on September 7, 2006, she got The E-mail. "I just laughed and cried. A lot. For about a week I couldn’t stop smiling or telling everyone I met the great news," she says.
From her experiences, Paula has learned a few things: "First, never stop learning. If you think you’ve got nothing more to learn, you shouldn’t be writing because it takes an average of ten years to complete your writing apprenticeship," she says. "And those who get there under that time are freaks." And, of course, eHarlequin.com was one of her resources. She found the editors’ threads were particularly helpful for finding out what they wanted in a submission.
Paula’s first book, Forgotten Marriage, will be out later in 2007, and she is now in the thick of a Desire continuity with authors Yvonne Lindsay, Bronwyn Jameson, Tessa Radley, Maxine Sullivan and Jan Colley, many of whom she’s known for years. Look for that in 2008.
And her second piece of advice? "Never give up."
