Folks, please help me welcome Ann Aguirre for a grilling session erm, interview.

How long have you written—one of those “since forever” or more of a “sudden epiphany” person?

I’ve pretty much always wanted to be a writer. When I was in first grade, we had Career Day at school. We got to pick what we wanted to do for a living from cards with job descriptions on them. I chose “freelance writer”. My teacher said, rather condescendingly, “That’s not a real job, honey. Why don’t you pick something else?” That should’ve prepared me for the row I had to hoe.

I never did pick anything else. I scribbled stories from age eight onward. In tenth grade, I wrote my first novel, 150 pages on an old typewriter: small-town girl meets a mysterious boy who works as the Winnie the Pooh mascot at Sears. Despite having led a boring life heretofore, our heroine saves the boy numerous times. Even then, I had no sense of what was proper behavior for a heroine.

My next ‘serious’ attempt came in college. I was studying English Lit, which mostly bored the crap out of me. I discovered romance novels about this time. I ate those books like Cracker Jacks, especially the Loveswept line. I was a real sucker for the Romancing the Stone type story, where the city-bred heroine goes into the jungle with a survivalist hero.

And I thought, I can do this! How hard can it be?

Thus was born my deliciously bad would-be Loveswept romance. The heroine, Skye, was a stripper / heiress. She ran away from her father’s tyrannical control to dance topless and make her own way in the world. Her father hired former Black Ops military man, Stone, to retrieve his wayward daughter. I called it Heaven and Earth. Symbolism! Who says I’m not using my Lit degree? To my vast astonishment, Loveswept didn’t buy it. (more…)