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Elda Minger
USA Today bestselling author Elda Minger is a RITA finalist
and has
won numerous awards, including Romantic Times' Best
American Romance.
She is well known in the romance world for over two dozen
romance
novels, both series and historical, and numerous novellas.
She is a
popular speaker, and has given several very well received
lectures at
National Conferences and Universities. Elda enjoys
approaching the
romance novel from a sociobiological standpoint, and this
approach has
made her talks different from many other conference
presentations.
Perhaps the most popular of these was a talk
entitled, "Writing Erotic
Sex Scenes That Sell", a discussion of the differences in
male and
female brains, and how men and women think. The tape from
this talk
went on to become the bestselling tape from the RWA
National Conference
in Orlando in 1997 and is still mentioned at conferences
today. (It can
be ordered through Bill Stephens Productions.)
Elda began her writing career at Harlequin Enterprises,
Ltd., the
single biggest publisher of romance in the world. She sold
her first
romance in her twenties and never looked back. She wrote
for the
American Romance series, then moved on to Temptation. She
has sold two
historical romances, one to Zebra/Kensington, and one to
Jove. Both
were set in Eighteenth-Century England, a time period that
fascinates
her.
She comes from a family of readers and writers. At one
point, when
her family lived in a small midwestern town in Illinois,
they realized
they had more books inside their house than the local
public library!
Her father, a history professor, published three books
during his
lifetime. Her Uncle wrote and published an extensive
biography of
Mozart, and her brother has published numerous articles
about B movies.
Elda's grandmother taught her to keep a journal from the
time she was
nine years old. With this background, writing -- and
reading -- have
always been a familiar and much-loved part of her life.
She began her writing career right out of college,
after graduating
with a B.A. in English and Theater from Kenyon College in
Gambier, Ohio,
and winning first prize in a playwriting contest. She has
also taken
numerous classes through the prestigious writer's program
at UCLA, with
an emphasis on screenwriting.
Elda lives in Los Angeles with her family, both two and
four
footed. She lives in a house up in the mountains in a very
close-knit
neighborhood overlooking the city. When she isn't writing,
she can be
found in her garden or taking one of her three dogs for a
long walk in
one of the canyons, or curled up with a good book! She
belongs to a
needlework group, a woman's circle, several writing
organizations, and
has a passion for travel, movies, and -- like most writers
of romance --
chocolate!
"Romance novels create happiness," she has said. "I
love knowing
that what I have created will go into someone's home and
lift their
spirits, touch their emotions, take them away from their
worries and
cares, hopefully give them a few laughs along the way.
That thought
both inspires me and keeps me going. I was a reader long
before I ever
attempted to write, and I know what romance novels did for
me. There's
nothing I would rather do with my life than create that
kind of
happiness."
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