Thursday 21 April 2005, 7.30 a.m. Auckland, NZ I’m in the en suite getting ready for work. Have just finished applying my makeup and brushed my hair and I’m about to apply hairspray when my hubby calls me from the bedroom (in bed) to say there’s someone on the phone for me. Who could be phoning me at 7.30 in the morning, I wonder… Oh, yeah, must be Silhouette phoning to buy my book (insert maniacal grin here). So I step into the bedroom, ask dh who it is and he says, I don’t know, some woman with a South African accent (huh?). Ever more confused I pick up the phone and am greeted by the dulcet tones of one of Silhouette’s associate editors, who’s definitely NOT South African, and she’s apologising for phoning me that early (like I’m complaining???) and says that MJ passed my manuscript on to her to read and that they both really liked it and that they’d like to buy it for Silhouette Desire. I gasp OMG! Really? and she assures me, yes really. At this point I think I told her I loved her. Both my daughters have come racing into the bedroom (no mean feat at 7.30 a.m. for two teenagers on school holidays!) and plonked themselves in the bed next to my dh and all three of them are lying there grinning at me like crazy. When I settled down Jessica told me that they’ve pencilled the book in for a Nov 2006 release (which has since been brought forward to October 2006 and will be released as THE BOSS’S CHRISTMAS SEDUCTION).

I made tons of notes during THE CALL (I still am blown away that I actually got one!) proving that it pays to keep a pen and paper next to the bed at all times. At this stage I’m running late for work but HAVE to call two of my dearest friends, Desire author Bronwyn Jameson (who I’d rung only the night before and surprised the dickens out of with another call so soon, and bearing in mind her time zone is two hours behind mine!) and Trish Morey (Harlequin Presents author also in Australia and two and a half hours behind NZ time! Ha!) who’ve offered me mountains of support over the past few years let alone the months prior to my call which had been a real roller coaster ride (case in point, I’d received four rejections in the four weeks leading up to the time my full ms was requested.) The whole thing seemed to happen very quickly. I sent a Q&S for my ms at the end of Feb for which the full was requested by MJ early March. I posted it away from New Zealand on 31 March and then only three weeks later, to the day, I got THE CALL! I’ve been writing and submitting for 13 years, but mostly to M&B in London and I was devastated in Feb this year when I was told that though we’d tried for quite a while to push my writing in one direction or another (i.e. Presents or Tender) that I straddled both the lines. The editor I was submitting to suggested that I might like to think about writing a new ms targetted at Modern Extra but also mentioned that my voice might better suit Desire (which Bron had mentioned once or twice in the past five or so years!) After a lot of consideration, and a great deal of soul searching, I decided that as one door closed I’d have a go at opening another… the one at Desire.

Always the kind of kid who either had her nose in a book or her head in the clouds, Yvonne Lindsay first tried her hand at romance writing at the age of 15. Now, many years older, hopefully wiser, and with the support of fabulous family and friends behind her, she’s become an author for Silhouette Desire and looks forward to long and enriching career with Silhouette.

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