The Fun Bio
Looking for Life...
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I didn't consciously leave academics, I simply got married. To an international businessman who'd grown up in Qatar and Lebanon, England and Switzerland. We moved. A lot.
My stepdaughter Diana lived with her mother in the north of England, so we spent considerable time there. One of my favorite trips was the six weeks we spent one Christmas and New Years at Lumley Castle just outside of Durham. Magic.
Having two children of my own slowed me down a bit, but not much. I just dragged them around the world with me. I developed strong arms.
At the time, my parents had a house in Medinacelli in Spain where they used to spend their summers, and the girls and I would meet them there.
Here's my mother (to the right) with one of my daughters.
Still considering myself an academic, I wrote a book on the ideology of gender equality in the French Revolution, which I imaginatively entitled Women, Equality, and the French Revolution. This is when I also started writing fiction seriously. I decided to try romances both because I'd loved Georgette Heyer and Mary Stewart as a teenager, and because I'd read a book that said they were easy to get published (big round of laughter here). Unfortunately, I never
met a Harlequin I could finish (nothing against the genre, they just don't tap into my personal romantic fantasies) and the places I was living didn't sell books with half-naked men and women on the covers. It's hard to write for a market you don't read, which is one reason it took me FOREVER to get published.
I still miss the Middle East, the smell of garlic sizzling in olive oil, the clean calm of endless desert, the incredible archaeological sites. I do not miss the distant rattle of machine guns. We moved to Australia. That's right, Australia. AGAIN.
We settled (sort of) in Adelaide, which I still consider the most beautiful, livable city in the world.
One year for Mothers Day, my children gave me a book entitled The Women of Botany Bay, about the women convicts who were transported from England to Australia in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It captured my imagination. I kept thinking, how could any woman have survived such an experience? The eventual result was the novel called Night In Eden, published by Ballantine as a lead title in the Australian spring of 1997. My career as a published author had begun.
I loved Australia and miss it terribly. But my life was changing and it was time to move on...
on to Still Crazy After All These Years...
Photos and text copyright Candice Proctor
