About the Author

The Hopeful Romantic, also known on this website as the Author, was born in ninteen-sixty-something on the east coast of the United States. Due to her father's career, the family moved every two to three years. In the course of her lifetime, the Author has lived and traveled all over the United States and in Europe, and now lives happily in Melbourne, Australia with her Aussie husband and their Aussie offspring.

The Author read her first steamy historical romance novel around 1977 and was immediately hooked. Had her mother known was was in those books, they would have been banned from the house. Fortunately, Mother was clueless, and the Author was free to pursue her passion for passion and her love of love. In the intervening years, she has read literally hundreds upon hundreds of romance novels of all sub-genres. Not surprisingly, the Author is a devoted bibliophile, and is well read in many topics and genres, including history, art, science fiction, literature, poetry, biography, humor, fairy tales and myths, and various other esoteric topics.

As for writing, the the Author has been playing at that for a long time. She wrote her first completed story at around the age of seven, and not only did she write the story, she illustrated it and bound the pages to form a book. Her next major attempt at writing stories was during high school, where she completed her first romance novel in longhand in several notebooks. Most of the story was written during boring classes or study hall, and while no copies of this early attempt at fiction writing exist, it can be safely stated that the book was abominably bad. The next writing attempt, a historical which was neither researched nor well-written, mercifully was never finished (although that manuscript had the virtue of being typewritten).

Many other partial manuscripts, ideas, research, and attempts at writing followed, none of them good, most of them clueless. By this time, the Author was starting to realize that writing a book was a lot more involved than just sitting down and scribbling out a story, and around 1993 she figured out that perhaps writing an outline and doing actual research would make for a better book. Although still sorely lacking in knowledge of the technical aspects of writing, in 1994 she prepared a complete story outline which had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and which was well-researched and potentially a decent book. After writing about a third of the manuscript, however, the work-in- progress was lost due to a hard drive failure and subsequent failure of the only backup. Discourged and disheartened, the Author put away the idea of writing for a few years.

In 2001, encouraged by her husband (who had read the now-lost partial manuscript), and burned out in her usual career, the Author decided to get serious about writing and to pursue the dream she had cherished for so many years. She joined the Romance Writers of America and the Melbourne Romance Writers Guild, bought a number of "how to" books on the craft of writing romance and fiction, and wrote this bio.

The Author is currently learning the craft of storytelling in order to write historical romanctic fiction, since history is her great passion. She has also considered writing a time travel romance novel if a good enough idea for one ever presents itself.

Other random information about the Hopeful Romantic might include that she enjoys music and art, loves drinking cappucino at romantic sidewalk cafés, has been addicted to the internet for many years, dotes on her offspring and on her cat, and enjoys taking photographs of her family and the city in which she lives.