The Long Journey Home

Hello, and welcome to those of you who may wander by.

I'm Nina Merrill, a soon-to-be-published author of romantica. (June of 2006! I am so excited I can hardly sit still.)

What's "romantica", you may ask? It's a relatively recent term, coined to describe the genre of romantic fiction that, along with a standard romance, contains descriptions of explicit sexual encounters. Romance + Erotica = Romantica.

But wait, you may say. Does that mean you write pornography, Nina?

No, in my opinion. What I write are stories about people who find romantic love together, along with a fulfilling and positive sexual relationship. The sex isn't always a large part of the story, but it is an important component.

Why is this entry titled "The Long Journey Home?"

Because it's a bit of a long story, my trek from corporate America to author. Since my elementary school days I've wanted to write. I wrote stories at first, then in my high school and college days, I wrote romance novels, the kind you don't show anyone because for some reason writing about love is foolish and somehow sad. There are several of those novels sitting in a bin in my basement. I don't really expect them to see the light of day, though occasionally I'll wander down and open the box and smile indulgently at those youthful imaginings.

Somewhere along the way I understood that writing wouldn't quite pay the bills.

Let's face it: writing wasn't going to pay the bills at all.

So I became a computer programmer-analyst for a large multi-national corporation, and spent the next twenty years writing programs, answering telephone calls, being waked up by crashing programs at all hours of the night.

And still I wrote. Mostly I wrote email, or training manuals, or design documents for bigger, better, smarter programs. And you know, there's something to be said about learning to write clearly from doing technical documentation: if your reader doesn't understand your documentation, you're going to get a phone call. It might not be a pleasant call, and worse still, it might be at three in the morning. So detail and clarity are a large part of my focus when I write, regardless of what I'm writing.

I wrote a lot; millions of words over the years, probably. But the itch to tell a real story never went away, never eased. And in late 2003 I stumbled into the interesting world of the internet, where writers are beloved and abused, hated and celebrated. It was like finding the key to my own heart again, a key I'd put away on a high shelf in a locked cupboard. I began writing my stories again, tales of love and redemption, and wandered my way at last to publication.

And here I am, with only a little longer to wait before it's real. It's a wonderful feeling. I am home at last, a writer who finally can say the words and mean them: "I am a writer." Will it pay the bills? Not the bills of the body, rent and groceries and car payments. But it will pay the bills of my soul.

So hello and welcome, Dear Readers. Pull up a chair; we'll have a chat and something tall and cool to drink, and I'll pop a little popcorn or pass out the chocolate. Life's too short not to do what you love.