It begins…

Hi there.

I’m Nancy.

Or I am now. I’ve been Delancey for the last decade, and I’m still her, but now I’m also Nancy. Which is funny, because Nancy is my legal name, so I really am more Nancy than Delancey, but that is neither here nor there.

Ahem. This is getting off to a rough start.

Let me tell you a bit about Nancy… only because it might explain how I’ve found myself here after a decade-long detour.

I was the kid who read through the entire kids’ section at the library and then had to have my mom come tell the librarians that it was okay for me to veer out into the other sections.

Wanna know what I read when I was allowed out of the Nancy Drew mysteries and Frank Baum’s many wonderful Oz books?

So much.

But mostly murdery things. And books about witchcraft and ghosts. Because that stuff is interesting. :)

It was Agatha Christie all the time for a while. Then I did a dark turn through Edgar Allen Poe.

By then I was about twelve, and so I marched off dutifully to read all the Sweet Valley High books and to obsess about Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

Then things just got scattered. Jean Auel, The Hobbit, anything with dragons or vampires or witches…

But the point is that mystery was where it started. My first love. I was a kid who subscribed to Games Magazine and loved to try to figure things out.

I was an English major. And I knew I would one day write a book. And as an adult I began editing as a way to stay close to fiction until I figured out what to write about. I edited for a couple small presses, and started my own freelance writing and editing business (which is now where I teach about craft, coach writers, brainstorm plots, edit books and generally geek out — Evident Ink). And those small presses had me editing romance (which, notice, I never read. Not ever.)

Romance was a comfortable place to start. The stories made sense. They followed a logical arc. I love a good worksheet, and I understood what filled in the boxes in terms of key elements of a romance. (Or I did after I wrote two or three).

My fear and my hope now?

That those skills that I learned and that I teach to others will transfer seamlessly as I delve into a whole new genre. That I’ll still be able to tell a good story even if there’s no hockey players or fake relationships…

Stay tuned… we’ll find out together!