Nora Roberts was born in Silver Spring Maryland, the youngest of five children. Her early schooling included several years in Catholic school. Though she jokes about the nuns, the award winning writer credits them with instilling in her the work ethic that has made her one of the most popular and prolific authors of the last twenty years. "…the fact is the discipline that they drum into education sticks. You can have all the talent in the world but if you don't have the discipline to sit down and write on a regular basis, you're not going to write or publish any books."
She married young, settled in Keedysville, Maryland, and worked briefly as a "really bad legal secretary." After her sons were born, she stayed at home and filled the hours by trying every craft that came along - ceramics, embroidery, sewing, canning, macramé, needlepoint, and baking. Then, came the fateful blizzard of '79.
Having been born into a family of readers, reading and making up stories had long been an integral part of Nora's life. As the story goes, one stormy winter's day, snowed in with the boys, tired of playing Candy Land and desperate for release, she took out a number two pencil, applied it to a spiral bound notebook and thus began her writing career.
Ms. Roberts did not become an immediate success. By the time Irish Thoroughbred, her first novel, was published in 1981, she already had three years of hard work and several rejected manuscripts behind her. Since then, her ascension to the top of the literary world can only be described as meteoric. According to Entertainment Weekly, "her stories have fueled the dreams of twenty-five million readers." And her books have been published in at least 25 different countries.¹
"You're going to be unemployed if you really think you just have to sit around and wait for the muse to land on your shoulder. That's not the way I work. I build a story."
"They're certainly not based on me—that would be boring. I'm not nearly as adventurous, brave or unselfish as any of my female leads. I don't know anyone that interesting either. My job is to make them up."
1 Expanded Bio at Ace's Bio-Farm
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NORA ROBERTS
NIGHT TALES
CHRONICLES OF THE ONE
THE COUSINS O'DWYER TRILOGY
BRIDE QUARTET
BORN IN TRILOGY
GALLAGHERS OF ARDMORE TRILOGY
DREAM TRILOGY
CHESAPEAKE BAY SAGA
THREE SISTERS ISLAND TRILOGY
IN THE GARDEN TRILOGY
THE CIRCLE TRILOGY
SIGN OF SEVEN TRILOGY
KEY TRILOGY
THE INN BOONSBORO TRILOGY
Intend to read them all? Keep track with these printable checklists:
Recent Series and Trilogies
J.D. Robb (In Death) Novels.
J.D. Robb's "In Death" Series in Order