UPDATE: The winner is…Cindy!
*~*~*

I sat down to create this post with Rogers’ and Hammerstein’s “Getting to Know You” from The King and I playing in my head. My favorite phrase from that song is, “you are precisely, my cup of tea.” I hope by the end of this post, after you’ve gotten to know me, I’ll be a tea to your liking.

Born and bred in Brooklyn, NY, I’m a child of the sixties’ Black Power movement and a recent transplant to the Southwest, celebrating thirty-five years of wedded bliss and enjoying seven years of minister-turned-romance-writer retirement.

My road to publication began in 2003 with a challenge from my mother-in-law and an episode of This American Life. When Jeanette learned I wrote X-Files fan fiction she asked me why I didn’t write about my own characters. That very week I listened to an episode of This American Life that featured Romance Writers of America (RWA), one of the few writing organizations that accepted unpublished authors. Inspired by Jeanette’s question, I joined. At heart, I was a mystery lover, so I figured RWA’s romantic suspense and mystery writers chapter could teach me about mystery writing in general. This turned out to be true, but surprise, surprise I fell in love with romance. Another chapter I had joined, Faith Hope Love (FHL), had a Finish The Book program. If you finished your manuscript by the end of the year, you’d receive a first 25-pages critique from one of their published authors. I signed up and finished my inspirational romantic suspense novel, Through A Glass Darkly. The wonderful critique I received emboldened me to enter FHL’s “Touched By Love” contest. I won second place in the short contemporary category.

That same year RWA was pushing general members like me to move toward PRO status (i.e. submitting finished work not yet accepted). One of the members of FHL had just become the editor for The Wild Rose Press’ inspirational line and put out a call for submissions. I figured I’d submit Through A Glass Darkly, get my rejection, and apply to RWA for PRO status. Didn’t happen. Wild Rose Press accepted my book. LOL.

So how does a church pastor writing inspirational romance move to writing the steamy shorts I’ve submitted to Delilah’s Boys Behaving Badly anthologies? Blame it on the Love Mystics of Begijn, whose writings I encountered in seminary. Maybe it’s the erotic romance writer in me but visions of cunnilingus danced through my head the first time I read a description of communion as the delight of taking the savior into your mouth. Whew. Thus began my journey to write Christian erotica and erotic romance. If my romances could evoke even a teeny bit of the ecstasy these love mystics shared in their non-fiction writing, I’d have “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the rest of your Lord,” winging me to my rest instead of Hamlet’s flight of angels. My first erotic romance, One Breath Away, earned this gratifying Amazon review: “A compelling spirituality weaves through this story, along with the passionate desire of both Mary and Eban to be fully known, sexually and emotionally,” so, I guess I’m succeeding.

I hope the roles played by the themes of Good Friday sacrifice and Easter resurrection joy in my Secret Identities story “Her Heavenly Phantom” keep up my winning streak. That’s me as tea. One lump or two?

For a chance at a $10 Amazon gift card, share in the comments what the themes in your favorite romances are.

About the Author

Michal Scott is the erotic romance pen name of Anna Taylor Sweringen, a retired minister transplanted from NYC to Albuquerque. Between guest preaching engagements and helping a small house church stay afloat with integrity, Anna has mentored pre-published authors in Romance Writers of America’s Pen2Paper program and continues to mentor in RWA’s RAMP program as well. She’s currently adapting the stories from Richard Wagner’s opera Ring Cycle into a Gilded Age and Pre-WWI series set in New York told from the POV of African-American women. In addition to erotic romance, Anna has self published a lite paranormal second chance romance series called Haunted Harlem as Anna M. Taylor.

Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/106e6b05cdfe/michal-scotts-newsletter
Amazon Author page: https://amzn.to/2TSHzRn
Twitter:  @mscottauthor1