Reading Romance

When did you first get interested in reading romance?

This question is easy for me to answer. I got interested at the age of fourteen when I used to buy adult romance magazines like 'Love Affair' and 'Loving' at the newsagents. I have no idea why I started buying them. I didn’t know anyone else of my age who read them or come to that, no adult who did either. What I can tell you though is why I read them.

They were written in the first person, so it sounded as if someone was confiding a secret to their best friend. I felt as though I was privy to something I shouldn’t really know about! When I say they were adult, I don’t remember there being any actual sex in them, although there well might have been, I just can’t recall it.

I only ever read them under the bed covers at night, and sometimes by torch light.

Those magazines had a big influence on my writing, so much so I wrote my stories, for English in school, in the first person. My teacher often read them out to the class. I can only remember one. It was something about a man who killed his wife, chopped up her body into little pieces and got them embedded in bales of hay as they went through a hay making machine! Charming and not the least bit romantic.

Sometimes the school bell would ring just as the teacher got to an interesting part in the story and the other girls would beg me to read out the ending to them. I suppose I had my fans back then, I just didn’t appreciate any of it. Nor, did I think I had any particular gift for writing.

It wasn’t until years later that I started to scribble stories down again. This was after I got married and had children.

Nowadays, I still read and write romance. And maybe that story about the man who killed his wife was significant because as well as writing romantic comedy I also write romantic suspense. My favourite films are The Godfather movies, Goodfellas and my absolute must watch TV show is The Sopranos!

Author's website: http://silverlady00.tripod.com

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