VOLUME 11, NO. 1     MAY 1997

Black sheep and a dragon's heart: engineered romances are bound for bookstores this fall

A couple of years ago, while talking with some writer friends about the number of books that feature black sheep-type heroes, Patricia Bray '84 announced jokingly that she'd like to write a book in which one of the main characters is a real sheep.

"I couldn't get that image out of my head," she recalls, "so I sat right down and started writing Jane and the Black Sheep. After months of rewrites and a new title, her first published novel will hit the bookstores in September 1997 as A London Season, a Zebra Regency Romance.

Bray says that while the title of the book has changed, a black ram is an important comic character throughout. As in many Regency period novels, romance abounds in her book.

"I was introduced to the works of Regency writer Jane Austen while I was a student at WPI," says Bray, who likes the Regency period for its excitement and drama. It was after all, the age of Sir Walter Scott, Napoleon and Wellington and also marked the end of the age of elegance and the beginning of the Victorian era.

A computer science major while at WPI, Bray is an advisory planner in the Information Systems Organization of IBM's Microelectronics Division near her home in Endicott, N.Y. "My IBM career is challenging and rewarding," she confesses, "but I've known since I was a child that I wanted to be a writer."

In 1994, having written over the years for her own enjoyment, Bray joined a local chapter of Romance Writers of America. She discovered that being part of the group helped her find the discipline and drive she needed to be a writer. Not long afterward, she sent her first novel off to a publisher.

The rejection slip that followed didn't daunt her, she says. On the contrary. She wrote A London Season, which turned out to be a finalist in the 1995 Romance Writers of America's Golden Heart contest for unpublished authors. Bray then signed with a literary agent who facilitated its sale.

After Season comes out next fall, Bray is slated to do book signings. "I don't expect national TV coverage, but I may appear on the local news, sandwiched between the weather and the high school basketball scores!"

Bray still manages to keep up with her day job at IBM. She writes at least four times a week, sometimes dashing off a few pages while traveling on business.

Bray's advice to would-be writers: "Just write. Don't postpone your dreams. Take a chance. I did!"

RT

As we were about to go to press...

we received word from another romance novelist, Sharon Schulze '80, whose medieval tales form part of the Harlequin Historicals line.

It turns out that the two engineers-turned-authors have more in common than their WPI degrees. Schulze was also a finalist in the 1995 Golden Heart competition. She recalls meeting Bray at the annual convention in Hawaii, but says they never talked long enough to realize they shared a common alma mater.

Although neither left with the coveted heart-shaped locket that signifies first prize, Schulze knew she was going home to something better - a contract on her first book, Heart of the Dragon, which had sold to Harlequin days before and is available in bookstores. Its prequel, To Tame a Warrior's Heart, should be in print September 1997.

Schulze has met lots of aspiring and successful romance writers. She knows of others who come from an engineering background. "I don't know if there's any connection that could be made, but this kind of writing certainly is escapist, compared to technical skills."

At WPI, she had to venture into Worcester to feed her passion for romances, since she found none in the campus bookstore or Gordon Library. After graduation Schulze continued in the master's program as a teaching assistant. "I shared an office in the Civil Engineering Department with four guys, and they always razzed me about what I was reading," she confesses. "Back then, I used to hide the romances in my soil mechanics book, so they wouldn't see the covers."

One afternoon, while she was devouring a particularly bad romance along with her lunch, it occurred to Schulze that she could do better. She took to writing during lunch hours while she worked at Alden Research Labs.

As the romance genre blossomed in the eighties, Schulze noticed a new heroine emerging, one who was stronger and wiser than the submissive, love-struck protagonists of earlier generations. "Today's romance heroines are very strong women," she contends. "Although my story is set in the 13th century, the main character is a very determined woman. When you first meet her, she is scaling a castle wall, because there is no other way in, and she's going to get in there, darn it! I think that women want to identify with that."

JKM

---