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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