A Hard-Hearted Man began as a school project. I went to Oberlin College, one of those quirky liberal-arts schools where students can major in subjects like “Frisbee Dynamics”. (I studied archaeology, which was normal enough to make me one of the campus conservatives.) Every January, we had a month to do something called a Winter Term Project, which was basically an independent study of anything that you could get a professor to sign off on. In 1989, I decided that my project would be to write a category romance novel. Now, Nora Roberts might be able to turn out a publishable book in one month, but I definitely couldn’t. By the time February arrived, I had a rough synopsis and eighty pages of a story about an archaeologist named Lilah Evans, who fell in love with a handsome ranch owner named Ross Bradford.

The new term was starting, and I had accomplished my objective with the romance novel project, meaning: school credit. So I stuffed the manuscript into a drawer and forgot about it for the next six years, which should tell you something about how often I clean out my desk.

Later, I went to Egypt to study at the American University in Cairo, but I really missed my college boyfriend, who was in Kenya, teaching at a biology field school. After a year in Cairo, it became clear to me that I wasn’t cut out for a life in academia, so when he suggested that I come to Kenya to work for the same program, I jumped at the chance.

The 20,000 acre ranch where I lived and worked became the model for Ross Bradford’s ranch, and Ross’s passion for wildlife conservation comes directly from what I heard from the biologists at the field camp. Ross was based partly on my boyfriend, and partly on the program director, a rugged fellow who had spent the previous few years battling AK47-armed elephant poachers in the Republic of Congo.

In 1995, I was living in San Francisco, doing odd jobs while I tried to figure out what to do with my life. I had always wanted to be a novelist, so I decided that it was time to get serious. I started by dusting off A Hard-Hearted Man (then titled, Heart Endangered) and rewrote it in my spare time. It took me almost a year to finish it, and another year to find an agent, who then sold it to Silhouette in two weeks. It was finally published in 1998, for a total start-to-finish time of almost ten years! The book is definitely a beginner’s effort, and has good and bad parts that reflect the patchwork process of writing it. To me, it is valuable as a souvenir of a learning process that taught me two lessons about being a writer. One, that you can get better with experience and practice—a lifelong process, I hope. And two, that there is no substitute for sitting down and doing the work. I heard another writer call this the “derriere in the chair” method, and she was right. This is still the best piece of writing advice that I know.

January 1998
isbn 0-373-07870-6
Silhouette Intimate Moments