Dear Readers, The love stories in my family have always been fodder for romance novels. My maternal grandmother and grandfather simultaneously ran a business together and raised four daughters, long before it was an accepted thing to do. Grandpa O’Dell ran the gas station and the barber shop; Grandma O’Dell managed the grocery and cooked for customers. They were true partners and madly in love and parted, tragically, way too soon when he succumbed to cancer when he was in his early fifties. Grandma grieved deeply but eventually picked herself up, started a new career as a cafeteria chef, and eventually found deep romantic love and happiness again, in the form of a second marriage. Read more here...

Ruth Ryan Langan (aka Ruth Langan) is an award-winning author of romance novels. She is a Romantic Times Career Achievement Award winner and has twice been nominated for Romantic Times Reviwers' Choice Awards, for Jade and Return of the Prodigal Son. She has spent much of her career writing historical romance novels for the Harlequin Historicals line of category romances. Many of her book are set in medieval times, while others are western romances. She has also written some contemporary romances, and often includes elements of suspense in her novels. Langan began her writing career in secret. Her family discovered her writings when her children came home unexpectedly from school one day and found her writing. When Langan's husband was told of her hobby, he bought her an electric typewriter "because 'writers need tools'". Her first book was published by Silhouette Books in 1981 after an editor picked it out of their slush pile. After the first sale was completed, Langan got an agent. Langan is a charter member of the Romance Writers of America. She has five children and lives with her husband in Michigan. Has also written under the name of Ruth Langan and R.C. Ryan

Robyn was born on 1940 in Northland, New Zealand. She was the oldest child in her family, and as a child, she thrilled her four sisters and one brother with bloodcurdling adventure tales, usually very like the latest book she'd borrowed from the library. Robyn owes her writing career to two illnesses. The first was a younger sister's flu. She was living with her husband and Robyn and spent most of that winter acquiring, suffering, and recovering from various infections. One day she croaked that she had read everything on Robyn's bookshelves, so would Robyn please buy her something cheerful and sustaining. Robyn found three paperbacks- one Mills and Boon Modern Romance novel and a couple of other romances. Robyn read them, too, of course, and so enjoyed them she spent the next couple of years hunting down more Mills and Boon books. This was much more difficult then than it is today, so she decided to write her own, and for the following busy 10 years she wrote and hoped that one day she would finish a manuscript good enough that was good enough to send to a publisher. The second illness was her husband's, and it was bad a heart attack. He was so young it terrified them all. While he was recovering, he suggested that Robyn finish the manuscript she was writing and send it off. It wasn't a perfect manuscript, but the doctor had said to humour her husband, so she finished the manuscript, edited it as best she could, and sent it off. Three months later, she was astounded to read a letter from the editor saying that if She made a few revisions they would buy her novel Bride at Whangatapu. Published since 1977, Robyn sees her readers as intelligent women who insist on accurate backgrounds, so she spends time researching as well as writing.Robyn Donald sometimes thinks that writing is much like gardening. It's a similar process creating landscapes for the mind and emotions from the seeds of ideas and dreams and images. Both activities can also lead to moments of extreme delight, moments of total despair, and backache.Now Robyn lives in the Bay Islands. She continues writing, and also finds time for a very supportive husband, two adult children and their partners, a granddaughter and her mother, not to mention the member of the family that keeps her fit - a loud, cheerful, and ruthlessly determined "almost" Labradordog.