UPDATE: The winner is…ButtonsMom2003!
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In one of my favorite video’s from when I was a kid, I was about five or six and I’m calmly sitting on the floor in a velvet dress, wearing one silver lame elbow-length glove and some very poorly applied burgundy lipstick, telling a very detailed story about an old lady, a chicken, and a fox. My three-year-old brother appears behind me and attempts to saw my head off with a piece of toy train track. Undeterred, I batted him away and continued with my story.

I don’t remember a time that I didn’t make up stories. I wrote a horror story in third grade that necessitated a call to my mom with the suggestion that I might need a therapist (It was a good story!). In fourth grade, I wrote a murder mystery play that had about forty-seven scene changes, and in sixth grade, I wrote my sweeping *cough* fanfic (rip-off) of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire in five spiral-bound notebooks.

But my romance origin story started when I was twelve and my dad moved to a small country in Europe that had just emerged from Soviet occupation. I had always been a voracious reader and quickly burned through the books I’d brought with me, thanks to the fact I barely spoke the language and didn’t know anyone, and I found myself in need of books. This was in the mid-1990s and the small store downstairs from my dad’s office had a very limited selection of anything in English. And when I say limited, all they had was a spinning rack of old Harlequin category romances.

I was hooked.

I continued to write and found that my supernatural and horror stories gave way to heaving bosoms, smoldering looks, and happily ever afters. I still have to fight with my tendency to drift into the omnipresent point of view that was popular back then, although I like to think I’m getting better. (My long-suffering critique partner might not agree.) Writing went to the back burner in my early twenties as I started my career, got married, and had kids. But I would still find myself thinking up plots, characters, writing scenes in my head while sitting in traffic. In the last year or so, I’ve started to make writing a priority again and am currently finishing up the second novella in the series that was spawned by the Boys Behaving Badly: Cowboys anthology. The first, Where the Light Comes In is available now on Amazon and The Way Back Home is available for preorder. The novella’s feature the grown-up kids from East of the Rift and all follow classic romance tropes as an homage to my first love. Just, hopefully, with a deeper POV.

What’s your favorite romance trope and why? My two favorites are probably enemies to lovers and second chances. Comment below for a chance to win a $5 Amazon gift card!  

About the Author

January George has been writing since she knew how, but fell in love with Happily Ever Afters when she spent the summer in Europe and the only English books she could find were Harlequin. She lives in upstate New York and writes at night when the cat, her husband, and the kids are asleep. Find out more about January George!

Her story inside Cowboys: A Boys Behaving Badly Anthology was “East of the Rift”…

A family tragedy reunites a lonely rancher with his estranged wife.