Debra Mullins

(from website)I hate writing bios. They always seem so cut and dried. But you came to my website to learn more about me, so here goes.I’m the oldest of four sisters, and we are full-blooded Irish on our father’s side. Oh, and our house had one bathroom. If you have any questions about where I got my flair for drama, just imagine that scenario on a Saturday night when four teen-aged girls need to get ready for their dates all at the same time.‘Nuff said.So, I am the writer in the family, though I always had a secret dream to be a torch singer. You know, like Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys. My voice is OK, but the only place I feel comfortable singing is in the shower, so that was out. Besides, my sister Kate would kill me. She’s the singer in the family. Seriously, she sang at Carnegie Hall once (yeah, as part of a choir and with the orchestra and a bunch of other people, but Carnegie Hall! How many people can say that and be telling the truth?)Anyway, I settled on writer and left the singing to Kate. My other two sisters are both artists, and no, they don’t have anything in the Louvre, but my sister Christine paints her house constantly, always changing the décor in her kids’ rooms. So you see? Creative impetus will out, and there’s no stopping it. Better to just give in and have the chocolate standing by for those moments of Artistic Frustration.After giving up my torch singer aspirations (but before I fully accepted that I am A Writer) I gave serious thought to a practical career. The term “starving artist” was not conceived out of whimsy, you know, and I did have a fondness for food and shelter. So, soon after high school, I considered a career as a simultaneous interpreter for the UN.I heard you giggle. Yes, I did. So let me clarify by adding that I have a gift for languages and had already taken several years of Spanish, French and Italian by the time I graduated high school, AND I had done the exchange thing in France, where I lived for a summer with a family, speaking nothing but French. So there.Ahem. Anyway, in order to be a simultaneous interpreter, you need to know five languages. I had four under my belt (since I do know grammar and punctuation, I consider English the fourth language). I just had to learn one more language.But that never happened. I chose True Love over College, then got married and started a family young.Yes, you can laugh now.Anyway, years pass. I gave in to my natural tendency to be a storyteller and started working on the one thing I had ever finished—a hand-written, 100 page “novel” about a Spanish pirate that I had completed in junior high. As an adult, I still felt there was a story there. That novel evolved into my first published work, ONCE A MISTRESS (Written in English, though my pirate does say cool Spanish words like mi amor and mi querida. Sigh. Swoon!) In 1996, ONCE A MISTRESS was a finalist in the prestigious Golden Heart competition run by Romance Writers of America. Two years later—OK, on January 26, 1998 at 4:06PM—Avon Books called and offered to publish my opus.So there you go. I’ve written eight more books since then, often utilizing my knowledge of other languages for flavor. I visited the old West with DONOVAN’S BED and THE LAWMAN’S SURRENDER. (Oh, and DONOVAN’S BED was a finalist for RWA’s RITA Award for Best Short Historical in 2001, which is like an Oscar nomination in the land of romance writing. How cool is that?) Then I visited the Regency era. I won the NJ Romance Writers Golden Leaf Award for Best Historical (2003) with A NECESSARY BRIDE. In 2005, THREE NIGHTS… was nominated for Best Historical Romance in competition for Virginia Romance Writers’ prestigious Holt Medallion.All of my Regency historicals have been optioned as featured selections by Doubleday Book Club and Rhapsody Book Club. My books have also been translated into Hungarian, Russian, and Portuguese f