About Cathy

When I was in high school, my Vietnamese mother told me I couldn’t read romance because, and I quote, “they rot your brain.”

Needless to say, when I got a job at the library, I promptly went in search of this forbidden fruit. I started by sneaking category romance in the house… a Harlequin here, a Candelight romance there. Slim paperbacks that felt like rebellion, but also were just fun, full of love, angst, and happy endings.

Then I met my best friend in college, and she had an entire closet full of them. I stayed up until 3:00 in the morning reading my first Julie Garwood. From there, I started devouring as many as I could get my hands on… and started noodling my first plots.

Keep in mind: I come from a family of MBAs and engineers. The idea of becoming a writer was amusing to them. Writing, in their estimation, was something that you plinked away at for fun when you retired. It certainly wasn’t something people did for a living.

I tried, I swear. I tried to be other things. But writing just kept tugging at me. I used my Mass Communications degree to promote other authors at my local writing chapter. I wrote in addition to a wide variety of day jobs, saying it was “just for me.”

So you’ve got to imagine my joyous shock when I sold my first book in 1999, to Harlequin.

It’s been over 25 years since then, and sometimes, I’m still just as shocked… and just as happy.