Mary Stella

When I was a young girl, I walked on the beach in my New Jersey hometown one day and held a shell to my ear. Instead of the ocean, I heard a voice proclaim, "You should write a book someday." I raced home, grabbed a #2 pencil and some of that weird fuzzy paper used in elementary school and scribbled my first story. The plot involved a family of chickens visiting the city, hardly Pulitzer-worthy, but it inspired me to give up my previous career aspiration of riding the High-Diving horse on Steel Pier in Atlantic City. A lot of years have passed since that fateful day, and along the way all my career choices have involved writing. Among other things, I’ve worked as a radio copywriter, public relations account executive, newspaper stringer and magazine journalist. Still, always in my mind lingered that early phrase, "You should write a book someday." In the mid- 1990s, I experienced a sparkling ‘aha’ moment and realized that the book wasn’t going to spring fully written from my brain. If ‘someday’ was ever going to come, I’d better get cracking. I’ve been a voracious book fan since first learning to read as a young child. I began reading romance novels in the late 1970s while I pursued my B.A. degree in English from Monmouth University, West Long Branch, NJ. Romance novels provided the break I needed from analyzing and writing papers about everything else I was reading for my studies. Always in my mind lingered that early childhood phrase, "You should write a book someday." In the mid- 1990s, I experienced a sparkling ‘aha’ moment and realized that the book wasn’t going to spring fully written from my brain. If ‘someday’ was ever going to come, I’d better get cracking. After some failed attempts and several learning experiences, I wrote a book that combines my love of romance novels and my love of dolphins. That book was All Keyed Up, my debut release for Medallion Press (July 2004). I now make my home in the Florida Keys an island chain of unique beauty and some equally unique characters. It wasn’t a stretch to also set my second book, Key of Sea (August 2005) here in the Keys, where I never run out of inspiration.