At thirteen, Beverly Brandt wrote to Mary O'Hara, the author of the My Friend Flicka series, to ask for permission to pen a fourth book in the series. Ms. O'Hara kindly rejected the offer, but encouraged Beverly to continue with her writing. Beverly's dreams of becoming an author were put on hold for a time while she earned a degree in finance and held various jobs in the insurance and high-tech industries to pay the bills. Upon returning to writing, Beverly wrote her first book in under three months and sold it just six months later.

Beverly has gone on to sell nine more novels and three novellas to two different publishers since that first sale in 2000. 2006 saw the release of not only her seventh full-length romantic comedy, Dating Game, but also Beverly's third romantic suspense, Dead Heat, written under the pseudonym Jacey Ford. The final in a three-book series starring a trio of former FBI Special Agents, Dead Heat hit bookstores in March.

A Pacific Northwest native, Beverly now lives in Texas and is enjoying both the warmer weather and writing full-time. She loves researching interesting occupations and locales for her books and spends most of her non-writing time curled up with an assortment of books on such topics as computer hackers, the automotive industry, plumbing, spying, aircraft manufacturing, and Southern cooking.

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Over the years, I’d made several attempts to write a book, but I guess I just didn’t have the skills to get past the first hundred or so pages. The feeling that maybe I should be doing something different propelled me to finally get serious and get over that hump. I was on such a high from finishing my first book that I started and finished my second in two months. I sold very quickly after that.

That’s one of the most fascinating parts of writing to me—that characters take on a life of their own during the writing process. Often (usually at about page 150 or so), a major character will reveal something that changes the entire book. When I first started writing, I would try to ignore that and stick to my synopsis. Unfortunately, what happened when I did that was that the words would stop coming and I’d have to eventually go back to that point and do what the character told me to do. After ten books, I’ve learned to trust the characters more. If a character reveals to me that she’s pregnant or broke or the daughter of gypsies (okay, that one hasn’t happened yet, but you get the idea), I go with it because it’ll turn out later in the book that detail is of vital importance.

I write romances for several reasons. First, I love knowing that I'm going to get to write that "happily ever after" ending that has the good guys winning out in the end. Not to be depressing, but I've seen the bad guys win a few too many times in real life to find that appealing in fiction! Second, I love the character growth that you see in most romances. In my books, there is always one main character who is going to be put through the wringer and will come out the other side as a better person. That's what I think is so powerful about romance—that you see someone being tested and triumphing over adversity. I find that very emotionally satisfying. And, third, I guess I write romances because I love to read romances!