Olivia began to tell romantic stories at the tender age of ten, when she and a friend would act out soap opera-ish scenarios with their Barbie dolls, complete with love triangles, evil villains, and secret babies. Naturally, she developed an interest in teen magazines with romance stories, and at thirteen, she graduated to full-length romance novels. From the very first book she read, she was hooked. Pirates, Vikings, abductions, feisty virgins and uber-alpha heroes? Yes, please! More, please! She loved being swept away into the past, and nothing less than an earthquake could make her set aside that book once she'd started reading it.
Little did she know what the future had in store for her. At age twenty, she moved to the US from her native country of Norway (she "met a guy on the Internet"). The first time she stepped into an American book shop, she fell to her knees and wept in sheer delight at the sight of the romance novel section. Okay, not really. But, being used to Norwegian publishers only releasing a couple of titles a month, she was amazed at the vast selection of books available.
Over the next couple of years, she read hundreds of romances from just about every sub-genre, but her greatest love was historicals set in the Regency era. Finally, she decided to try and write one herself. After much blood, sweat and tears (again, not really, except perhaps the tears...), she signed with an agent and thought her path to publication was in the home stretch. Alas, while a few publishers were interested, they all ended up saying "no, thanks." (Insert sad face here.)
Olivia then took a lengthy break from writing. She and her husband (that "guy she met on the Internet") welcomed their first child after 10 years of marriage, during which they'd worked on the whole growing-mature-enough-to-become-parents thing. Olivia soon found that it's much easier reading an eBook while holding an infant that really, really did not like to sleep, and nowadays she rarely reads print books anymore. This was such a big leap for someone who's rather set in her ways and not fond of change that the next logical step was to jump on the bandwagon and give self-publishing a try.
When not writing or reading, Olivia can be found spending time with her family, relaxing by watching TV, or using the Internet (where she'll waste too much time clicking on silly, useless links on Facebook and Twitter). She lives in Las Vegas with her husband and daughter--a climate very unlike her home country, Norway, but at least the heat inspires her to write steamy romance novels.
Okay, not really.
