Get to know Kathleen Shoop
My first love in writing was women’s fiction. Then I added
historical fiction to the list of genres I was interested in authoring. I adore
non-fiction and the factual, antiqued stories that have faded into obscurity if
anyone ever knew them in the first place were absorbing to me. So connecting
facts with fiction was a perfect fit. But as my journey on this writing path
has continued, the trail has widened again. I’ve begun to write romance.
I used to read romance in fits and bouts. One summer in
college I met my literary soul mate—my roommate, April’s, mother, Mrs. English.
She and April kindly invited me and another roommate to visit. They had a
library that was outfitted from top to bottom with every romance novel you
could imagine. In between staying at their home in sunny St. Helena, we roomies
traveled up and down the California coast, sitting three across the front seat
of a barely drivable Chevy Nova with wide brimmed hats and sunglasses repeatedly
blaring a cassette tape of the Fine Young Cannibals.
In between the endless laughter and mild trouble with
interlopers, cars, and housing, I read incessantly. While laying on Laguna
Beach, sitting by Lake Tahoe, stuck in traffic in L.A. on I-5, hanging out at
April’s home, I devoured a romance book a day. Mrs. English’s love for these
novels said it all, “They are happy,” she would say. And I agreed as we hovered
over the next find, reading the back and deciding who would get it next. Other than
recalling Jude Deveraux’s name I can’t pinpoint a single other author’s name,
but Mrs. English fed my literary habit in way that has not been duplicated
since.
These romance novels were the perfect compliment to my fairy
tale summer where my roommates and I went shoeless, had zero responsibilities,
worked only to earn enough money to eat (we slept on the beach in Carmel and
borrowed an apartment in San Francisco), borrowed a car, were gifted with my
friend’s father’s gas card back when all you could get at a gas station was gas
and come potato chips, and used credit cards when necessary. We lived on Mrs.
Field’s samples, bread, two-liter bottles of diet coke and for some reason,
yogurt covered pretzels from the bulk section in Safeway. This sounds like hell
in some ways, but it was pure adventure at the time—it was when my real goal to
be a writer was born.
The entire summer was a fantasy of sorts. We drove for days,
basking in a friendship filled with so much laughter I still giggle when I
think about being lost in an area outside of Candlestick Park in Oakland, California
where the police yelled at us for being lost…as if we did it on purpose. Idiocy
can be funny when you’re young and stupid. What does this have to do with my
writing journey, my romance tales? Well,
it’s the lure of happy, happily ever after, romance in every sense of the
word—even as it applies to friendship—that turned me to writing, that made me
want to capture moments that meant something even if in writing I would be capturing
them in the context of fictional characters’ lives.
