So, most evenings after she and her husband Douglas put their three children to bed, she got online and chimed in. Desperately needing a semblance of a social life away from childrearing and lab work, she became an active evening participant. “It was very lively, like a 24-hour literary cocktail party.” There were several published authors in the group. She signed up and found a literary forum for book lovers. One day her editor sent her a floppy disk for four free hours of access to try out CompuServe-one of the fledgling internet providers in the 1980s. Using her expertise in scientific and technical software, and her experience in laboratory automation, she supplemented her salary freelancing for Byte, a computer magazine. She spent eighteen months using Fortran computer language to analyze ten years’ worth of data collected by another professor on the contents of bird gizzards. She was hired by the university without a job description, so she figured she could create her own research program because she was proficient in computers. And the rest, as they say, is eighteenth century history.ĭiana wanted to be a novelist since she was eight, but life got in the way, and she became an assistant research professor of biology at Arizona State with three children and struggled to make a living. “That caused a tremendous stir.” Diana laughs at the memory. So, her publisher, Delacorte, decided to distribute 1,200 hardcover copies for free at the annual Romance Writers of America conference. But romance was published only in paperback back in the early 1990s. Before it was ever decided her novel was going to be a romance, her contract called for both hardcover and paperback editions.
0 kommentar(er)
