LIKE MANY WRITERS, I've led an interesting life, with jobs varying from fry cook to Coca-Cola bottler, with assorted detours in-between. For a while, a long time ago, I wrote Science Fiction short stories, but the stories kept getting rejected as too romantic. They all had happy endings.

Discouraged after a couple of hundred rejections, I swore I'd never write fiction again. So I went back to school and became a botanist, about the only profession in which I could be paid to tramp around the desert and the woods, picking flowers.

My thesis research resulted in the discovery of two new plant species, Packard's mentzelia (Mentzelia packardiae Glad) and Thompson's mentzelia (Mentzelia thompsonii Glad). After graduate school, I became an environmental consultant and found that I was writing or editing about half the time: technical reports, proposals, and papers for botanical journals. Of course, all that awoke the old yearning to write a book.

The first intentional romance I wrote was a (really bad) Regency. Even though it was rejected everywhere I sent it, writing it taught me that book-length romances were what I was fated to write. Older and wiser (and a lot more stubborn), I kept trying. I wrote other books, learned to revise and rewrite, went to workshops and took classes, and entered contests. And kept telling myself that sooner or later my books would sell.

My dream came true when I finally sold The Queen of Cherry Vale, a western historical romance. It is the first book in a series I call "Behind the Ranges", a title based on Kipling's poem, The Explorer.

Although I grew up in Idaho, I now live in Portland, Oregon It's a great place to write, because the rainy season lasts for eight months, a perfect excuse to stay indoors and tell stories. Flowers bloom in the Gladhaus garden every month of the year and snow usually stays on the mountains where it belongs. I have four children, three granddaughters and one grandson.