Alice Sharpe

I was born in Sacramento, California. As a child, I wrote plays for the neighbor kids and invited their parents to performances. As I got older, I started my own family newspaper, handwritten and hand delivered, for the extortion price of 25 cents. Eventually, I moved into writing angst-ridden poems and journals – lots of them. Right after graduating from high school, I married the love of my life whom I met while walking on a beach in Northern California. We had two children, spent years building a house, juggling pets and living on sailboats. All the while, I wrote stories but I never attempted to sell them.When the kids started Junior High, I started marketing my writing. When my short stories were turned down by mainstream women's magazines, my mother suggested I try a confession magazine. I sold my first story to them within two weeks. What a feeling of accomplishment! I walked on air for about a week! It took me almost two years to sell my next story, but after that, I went on to sell over two dozen to the various confession magazines. The experience of learning to get a story off the ground within a sentence or two was invaluable as was the connection I made with one of the editors. When she moved to a small book publisher, I sent her a completed manuscript which she bought. I wrote twenty books for her, mostly romances with a few mysteries thrown in. During this time, I learned about pacing, plot development and characterization. There is nothing a writer can do to improve their craft that trumps the actual setting of oneself in a chair and writing. Eventually I sold a manuscript to Silhouette. Now, forty books and many editors later, I've written for Avalon, Silhouette, Kensington, and Harlequin Intrigue I am also still married to the love of my life and our two children have given us three wonderful grandchildren.