Melissa Johnson

Being a writer is what I knew I wanted to be long before I knew how much work it would take to be one. I started writing as a teen, but it would be a long time before I actually completed a full, novel length story. There was dark, teenage angst poetry and paranormal short pieces with a quirky, but still dark humor that hinted at what I liked from the start. In my twenties I wrote my first short story romance -- a sweet, contemporary story set in a bookstore. (In hindsight, it does seem like I was the most conservative twenty-something ever!) But it was the ideas I found most fun, including the idea of being a writer! My ideas of paranormal romance resurfaced and blossomed in my thirties, even if by then I already considered myself a bit of a late bloomer. It's a good thing no one told me it would take another ten years or so to write the first novel! Along the way, I discovered the details of the grand ideas were often elusive. The characters asked for more...more plot, more setting, more emotion tying all the grand ideas together. But I'm very glad I didn't give up...even if my motivation to finish a story has sometimes been to be tell myself I'm never doing this again. Thank goodness I did. I've begun and ended the story journey several more times since that first book and each time is a new batch of challenges. It's interesting to note my core instincts for the type of story I write has stayed much the same as it was in the early years. I love the characters that have evolved from the first inklings of my paranormal ideas...a fantasy world of guardian angels and wizards, time traveling to the Regency historical period, to writing characters who may be immortals and ghosts, but remain humans with a love story to tell. It's all part of continuing a journey I began a long time ago.

I grew up in a rural community in Northern Minnesota where the running joke went something like, 'we live 40 miles from nowhere.' I think the isolation of my environment made me a romantic dreamer of exotic locales, even if just about anywhere seemed exotic in comparison!