What about Kaenar Langford?

I must admit that I had a pretty normal childhood. I was born in a little village on the coast of Ireland and came to Canada as a small child. I’ve always been a voracious reader. My friends and I all read the ‘Nancy Drew’ books and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have a book on the go.

I can remember the very first romance novel that I ever read. I can even picture the small-town drugstore where I bought it. The book was ‘The Wolf and the Dove’ by Kathleen Woodiwiss and even though I wasn’t that young, I’d never read anything like it. It was lusty. It was sexy. It was naughty and I was hooked. As the years went by I began to move through the genres of romance until one day I read a short story by Shannon McKenna then a novel by Robin Schone and then Angela Knight’s book Mercenaries. Now we’re moving to a whole other end of the spectrum and it’s addictive.

So how does a teacher from Ontario, Canada end up going from being a reader to writing erotic romance for Ellora’s Cave? In October of 2005 I went to a seminar on ‘How To Write a Romance Novel’ and twenty minutes before the end of the workshop, the presenter gave us five minutes to write an introductory paragraph to a romance novel. My mind was a blank but I just shut out all the noise and wrote the first thing that came into my head. It was well received when I read it aloud to the group so I came home and put it on the computer so I wouldn’t lose it.

I started to write and continued for five months, thinking every few weeks that I was almost done but there was always more to write. I finished Lucifer’s Angel, submitted it, got back some rejections then a letter from Ellora’s Cave asking me to make changes and resubmit. I spent three weeks reworking it, resubmitted then got a lovely letter of acceptance. They accepted another, Jude’s Choice, soon after that and my career as a writer was born.

It’s addictive, the writing. Sometimes I find it hard to do other things as I want to be at my machine cranking out more stories all the time. My friends and family are ecstatic about my success and are always asking about the books and what I’m working on. Sometimes when I tell them that it’s a futuristic, ménage à trois or something like that they wonder if they really should have asked.

As long as the ideas keep filling my head, I’ll keep putting them to paper (or the computer screen).

And that initial paragraph from the workshop- it’s in the book just as it was first written at the workshop and when I got back the edits for Lucifer’s Angel, my editor had put in the margin-good opening paragraph. Thanks Helen!