I’ve been a reader all my life, starting out with fairy tales and graduating to reading everything in the house when I grew older, including my parents’ romances, mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, and action / adventure.
If a writer can combine romance and humor with a fantasy, science fiction, or a paranormal element, I’m hooked. Add action / adventure, and it’s even better! Since I couldn’t find quite enough books that combine these elements, I sat down to write some of my own. The result is the books you’ll see on this website.
And now that I’ve taken an early retirement from my government job, I am working at my first love—publishing—and live in Colorado with my rescue dog, Honey. See below for her picture as well as pictures of some of my other dogs and some other fun pics of my friends and me.
FAQs
Q: Do you have a degree in creative writing?
A: Uh, no. I have a B.S. in Industrial Engineering. Hey, I like both words and numbers.
Q: How did you get started writing?
A: I’ve always loved to read, and was a “wannabe” writer for a long time. I wrote a little when I was very young—a horrible mish-mash of the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew, but didn’t do any more fiction writing until after I went through a bad time in my life many years later. Reading wonderful novels helped me through that hard time, and I decided then that I wanted to write books that would do the same thing for other people.
Q: How did you sell your first book?
A: It took me two and a half years to write my first book, Golden Prophecies, but I was learning the entire time I was writing it: joining writing organizations, attending classes and conferences, reading writing books, analyzing the market, getting feedback from a critique group, and writing. Luckily, Leisure Love Spell was buying futuristic romances, and they bought my first book in April 1994 after it had been rejected by three other publishers.
Q: Where do you get your ideas?
A: From a strange little man in Peoria…. In other words, I don’t know! They attack anytime, from everywhere—when I’m watching movies, reading books, taking a bath (my best ideas strike when I’m soaking wet), whenever. I just open my mind and let them come.
Q: Why do you write under more than one name?
A: I established my romance writing career as Pam McCutcheon, and most of those books are romantic comedies with a very light tone. Some have paranormal/fantasy elements, so I kept that name for the fantasies. And now that I’m also writing Young Adult urban fantasy which is quite different, I have a second name—Parker Blue. Debra Dixon came up with it to reflect my writing, and I love it.
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