Meet Our Greyhaus Authors - Sharon Lathan

We have another installment of Meet Our Authors. Today we get to meet with Sharon Lathan. Make sure to really ask her a lot of questions. She is an awesome author with a lot of knowledge.

You can ask everyone who has known me since birth and they will universally agree that I am above all a woman who strategically plans her course with near military proficiency. Yet somehow writing and being a published author blindsided me! After six years I am still swaying under the impact but gradually restoring my equilibrium.

When I was nine I decided I wanted to be a nurse. Not so unusual from most girls except that in my case being a ballerina or famous singer never became a preferred or even a second choice. My course was firmly set and I doggedly persevered, obtaining my RN license at 21. Immediately I entered the specialty area I was called to - that being Neonatal ICU - and never have I regretted this direction. At 22 I married my husband Steve (27 years and counting!), and within a reasonable period of time welcomed our two children, Emily and Kyle.

 All according to The Plan!

 Now, don’t get me wrong. Life always throws some curve balls and there were certainly some surprises along the way, but for the most part the first 40 years of my life fell in line with how I envisioned. I was slowly approaching that golden place I dreamed of where the “kids” would leave home, husband would retire, we would live simpler and travel more, I would be able to work less, grandchildren would be born for the sole purpose of me spoiling them rotten, etc. It was, as you can guess, all part of The Plan.

Then one day in 2006 I decided that “just for fun” I would join the league of fan-fiction writers online and pen a sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. After all, the children were older and not needing as much attention so a hobby to fill a handful of free hours was perfect. I am not sure when it happened but I think The Plan drastically altered on the day a few months later when my husband insisted on buying me a laptop so that my son would no longer stare at me with sad puppy eyes begging me to let him have his computer back!

 By the end of 2006 I strongly suspected that my hobby was no longer a hobby. Gradually I realized that while steeped in the world of science as a nurse and following my life’s plan, the stories that had forever played within my head as a mere distraction while vacuuming or doing some other dreaded household chore had long signaled a buried talent. I could write! Believe me, no one was more shocked than me. In fact, when the initial rejections poured in I nodded my head and said, “Yep, just what I thought.”

 Fortunately my online fans encouraged me to keep trying to get published and finally one person believed in me. That was Deb Werksman at Sourcebooks. Being a published author and having a second career was never part of The Plan so if not for her faith in my style of happily-ever-after sequel I would not be writing this post. Now, of course, I am confident in my abilities to write and have decided that even though the dream of working less has effective been blown to smithereens, I am cool with the New Plan.

 Moral of my story? I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. I have books to write so will leave the philosophizing to someone who has more time!

Sharon Lathan bio--

Sharon Lathan is the best-selling author of The Darcy Saga seven volume sequel series to Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice. Sharon began writing in 2005 and her first

novel, Mr. and Mrs. Fitzwilliam Darcy: Two Shall Become One was published by

Sourcebooks Landmark in 2009. Her eighth novel will be released in April 2013, The Passions of Dr. Darcy an epic tale of an English physician in Georgian Era India.

 Sharon is a native Californian currently residing in the sunny San Joaquin Valley with her husband of twenty-six years. When not hard at work on her faithful MacBookPro laptop or iMac desktop, Sharon is at the hospital where she works as a Registered Nurse in a Neonatal ICU as she has for twenty-eight years.

 Sharon is a member of the Jane Austen Society of North America, the Romance Writers of America, the Beau Monde and Hearts Through History chapters of the RWA, and serves on the board of her local chapter, the Yosemite Romance Writers. In 2010 Sharon created Austen Authors with novelist Abigail Reynolds, a group blog for published Jane Austen literary fiction authors.

For more information about Sharon, the Regency Era, and her novels, visit her website/blog at: www.sharonlathan.net or search for her on Facebook and Twitter.