Author Spotlight

When our oldest son was eight years old his kidneys failed. I had two other young children at home; I was pregnant. And here I was, on the Critical Care floor of a children’s’ hospital seventy miles from my husband, my other children, surrounded by sick children, injured children, dying children … and sleeping on a cot beside my own very ill son. For weeks on end. For nine long months, until his first transplant (and three weeks after the birth of our daughter), I performed dialysis on our son at home and in the hospital. I rode in too many ambulances, I watched too many children die, I sat, unable to sleep, in the Parents Lounge with other mothers going through their own hells – and I noticed something.

The nurses who lived with all this pain and suffering every working day, all seemed to have romance novels stuck in their pockets as they rode the elevators to the lunch room in the windowless basement. The mothers hid inside the pages of romance novels when they couldn’t sleep, knowing they could be interrupted when the words “Code Blue” blared over the loudspeaker, knowing one of those calls could be for their child. A librarian friend kept me supplied with romance novels – I had a special small suitcase for them and lugged it to the hospital with me along with my pajamas, maternity clothes, and stash of cookies.

We mothers would read, share, trade the books that kept us sane. We all lived in a real world in that hospital, a world too real; we all functioned at the highest level, because there was no choice but to function, to persevere – and we all occasionally escaped that world into the hope and happy endings of romance novels. Those moments of “escape” made it easier, never easy but easier, to deal with the real world.

I’d written my first book, THE BELLIGERENT MISS BOYNTON, just before our son’s kidney failure. It wasn’t a career move, it was just an idea I had and wrote with little thought to a career. I wrote my second book during those long nine months, staying awake all night twice a week, to scribble it in longhand at the dining room table. A Regency romance, a very funny romance, this book became THE TENACIOUS MISS TAMERLANE – and, looking back now, as I write this, I guess the word “tenacious” was, sub-consciously – a pretty good choice.

Years later I was told, by a reviewer, that she called this book her “rainy day” book, because if she felt down, she knew reading this book would make her laugh. I wrote that book for me, and for those nurses, for those mothers trying to make it through just one more night. So that’s how it really began, with that second book, before the first one was sold. It was that second book that told me, yes, you have a chance for a career here. You can do something for yourself that just might make somebody else’s day a little brighter. It sounds hokey, but that’s how it happened…

A quarter of a century later, I am writing my 100-and-some novel for these same people. I want to believe, do believe, I bring smiles, I bring hope, I bring the CHANCE of happiness; not a promise, not a certainty, but the CHANCE. I know, have learned, that one of the best ways to keep your sanity is to escape reality every once in a while.

So if you haven’t read one of her books, I highly recommend them. Here are a couple of my favorite of her books…for more of her books check out her website www.kaseymichaels.com