An Introduction of sorts….

Thank you for stopping by! I realized the other day that it would behoove me to do an introduction of sorts, so here it goes. My name is Michele Ryan, although that’s not completely my really my name as I use a pseudonym. When I dove into this world of writing, I didn’t know if I’d feel comfortable using my real name. I know… I know what you’re thinking. Why?! Who wouldn’t love to see their name in print…on a published book no less!

Well, that’s easy. You see I have three young children, who all happen to attend Catholic school. I know another author who informed me that she received some backlash when she first got published. Her son also attended Catholic school. As a mom, I feel my job is to always protect my children. Although not ashamed of what I write, this path was my choice and not my children, so Michele Ryan was born.

Michele is actually my middle name and Ryan is my husband middle name. Therefore my writing name still has great meaning to me.

I’m a 45 year old, who curses like a sailor and is a stay at home mom.  Although to be honest with you, I feel odd stating that I’m a SAHM since all three of my children are in school full time. But it is what I am and I’m quite proud of it. I have a 9-year-old daughter (whose a handful) and two boys, aged 7. If you haven’t figured it out yet. They are twins, identical to be exact. So for the last 9 years, I’ve been really busy!

I’m also an avid reader. I found reading when I was a teenager and I haven’t looked back. Just recently I found the first book I ever bought from my babysitting money.  Debbie Macomer’s Yesterdays’ Hero, published in 1986 through Silhouette Romance. It was $1.95. From there, I found Julie Garwood, Brenda Joyce, Linda Howard, Jude Deveraux, Irish Johansen, and Johanna Lindsey. The list goes on and on. I actually still have a bunch of books that I bought in my younger years. They are my treasures, and I go back and read them from time to time.

I continued to read for years, till I met and fell in love with my husband. My priorities changed, as did where I spent my money. Then about five years ago, my husband bought me a Kindle. Which I’ll admit, I didn’t want and refused to use for a long time. It wasn’t like a book, which I could hold in my hands and smell the paper and the print. I eventually sucked it up and started looking at Amazon. But I was lost. Authors I had loved no longer wrote in the historical genre that I loved. My husband told me that Amazon had free books, so I started with those. Then I found Lora Leigh. The first book I read was Tempting the Beast. Not a prude by a long shot, the writing shocked me. In a good way of course.

The books I had read previously, either implied sex or spoke about a man root and a woman’s flower and they never used words like, fuck, come or pussy. I found erotica and I loved it. I promptly bought and downloaded the entire Breed library up to Lion’s Heat.

From Facebook I found a group of people who also loved Lora Leigh’s Breed series. It was there that I was introduced to TL Reeve, who even though I have only spoken to her over chat, text and Skype has become one of my best friends and now my writing partner.

In 2013, I experience another first, a book conference. I was blown away and glad my friend Debbie asked me to go with her. I went into RAW 2013 with eyes wide-open, taking everything in. It was there, during a panel listening to Lora, Sylvia Day and Dana Marie Bell talk that I realized that they did the same thing I DID! I was totally gob smacked.

I realized during that panel that I wasn’t crazy!  The characters I would often build in my head, and the scenes I used to play out in my mind was exactly what these authors were doing!  Who the hell knew!

I knew what I wanted to do right then and there. I came back home and while waiting for my truck to be serviced, I timidly asked, ok I beat around the bush and finally asked TL if she’d like to write a book with me. Nervous didn’t even begin to explain how I felt that day. TL was already an established published author. Why the hell would she want to write with me?!

Needless to say, when she said yes, I almost passed the hell out. I told her the idea that I had. She liked it and we built it from there. Coming up with the names of our hero and heroine. Little by little we worked on it and it evolved. It started off as a M/F but TL felt it would work better as M/M/F.  I’ll deny it to the day I die, but she was totally right. That story is called Mating Their Witch. It took us almost two years to write it, but we did and our plan is to self publish that.

We’ve also written two books that have been picked up by Decadent. One is through their ROAR line; the other is through the Wiccan Haus line. I’m also working on my own book for the Wiccan Haus line. *Fingers and toes are crossed that it’s picked up.* As I love Molly and Ben’s story and would love the opportunity for you guys to read it.

I also have been working on a couple other books on my own. There will be 3, maybe 4 books in the series. The 4^th one is still up in the air, and has nothing really to do with my original idea. The character jumped off the page at me as I wrote the first book. So we’ll see. I can tell you, they are contemporary and the first book is completely done and as it stands now is a little over 100K words. I’m sure once I get it edited it’ll be a bit smaller. I’m slowly working on the second book in this series. These will most likely be self-published also. But we’ll see, as I’m not sure what life has planned for me yet!