By day Barbara Miller works as a business analyst; by night she runs a retirement home for aged horses, dogs and cats. On the week-ends she spends a lot of time in Regency England, creating heroes and heroines to fight the Napoleonic Wars, shock London society, and set the countryside in an uproar. Her accomplice is her computer-expert husband Don, who is one of her biggest fans. Barb started writing because she was running out of reading material and all her copies of her Georgette Heyer novels were becoming dog-eared. Under the name Laurel Ames she produced eight Regency-era historicals for Harlequin, one of which was nominated for a Rita in 1994. Barb admits to enjoying the research as much as the writing, and has the books to prove it. France used to be in the dining room and England in the living room. Now that she has taken over the upper story of their old farmhouse as an office at least all the books are one floor. This saves a tremendous amount of time when she is trying to confirm an obscure fact in the middle of the night. Dearest Max is Barb's first Sonnet and although it is a Regency, it required research into Henry VIII's time since the characters are looking for an artifact from Nonsuch Palace. She feels that the combination of romance and mystery is the perfect mix for a fast-paced book. "The most bizarre feeling is when you are proofreading one of your own books and you get down to the last 30 pages and start wondering how the author (you) is going to fit everything that has to happen in before the end. That's when you know you have the pacing right." My Phillipe, Barb's second Sonnet will be released in October of 2000 and has been blessed with a cover as beautiful as the one for Dearest Max. All the readers want to meet these men. Barb is a member of the Western PA Chapter of Romance Writers of America and edits The Laurel Wreath newsletter for them. You may email her at
[email protected].