Alice Sharpe

I was born in Sacramento, California. As a child, I wrote plays for the neighbor kids and invited their parents to performances. As I got older, I started my own family newspaper, handwritten and hand delivered, for the extortion price of 25 cents. Eventually, I moved into writing angst-ridden poems and journals – lots of them. Right after graduating from high school, I married the love of my life whom I met while walking on a beach in Northern California. We had two children, spent years building a house, juggling pets and living on sailboats. All the while, I wrote stories but I never attempted to sell them. When the kids started Junior High, I started marketing my writing. When my short stories were turned down by mainstream women's magazines, my mother suggested I try a confession magazine. I sold my first story to them within two weeks. What a feeling of accomplishment! I walked on air for about a week! It took me almost two years to sell my next story, but after that, I went on to sell over two dozen to the various confession magazines. The experience of learning to get a story off the ground within a sentence or two was invaluable as was the connection I made with one of the editors. When she moved to a small book publisher, I sent her a completed manuscript which she bought. I wrote twenty books for her, mostly romances with a few mysteries thrown in. During this time, I learned about pacing, plot development and characterization. Eventually I sold a manuscript to Silhouette. Now, thirty books and umpteen editors later, I've written for Avalon, Silhouette, Kensington, and Harlequin Intrigue. eharlequinI am also still married to the love of my life and our two children have given us three wonderful grandchildren.