Biography
Barbara Cool Lee grew up on a ranch in California, and pretty much everything in her life has ended up in one of her books in one form or another. As a child she was fascinated by medieval legends [Tales of the Ariane, The Immortality Curse] and California history [Pajaro Bay]. She flirted with the idea of becoming a doctor [A Taste of Heaven, The Unwilling Alchemist], but quickly discovered she was too squeamish. She worked her way through college as everything from an order-taker in a Chinese restaurant [Off the Deep End] to a ride operator at an oceanfront amusement park [The Madrigal Heir]. She was accepted to law school but decided she really preferred storytelling to torts, naïvely thinking writing books would be easy and success as a novelist would take a year or two [!] to achieve. She worked for many years in faculty services at a university, proofreading manuscripts and designing databases, while writing in her car on her lunch hour. She now happily devotes her time to caring for her family and writing.
Press
(FYI: scanned articles may take a lonnng time to load over slower internet connections.)
"Colleagues pool together to send staff member to national writing conference"
"Romance novels almost always have happy endings"
"Staff member wins national romance writing contest"
"Seven years of lunch time laboring yields award for romance writing"
Trivia
Barb's books have won a bunch of writing contests, including the Romance Writers of America's Golden Heart award.
She holds degrees in Foreign Languages, Political Science and Medieval Studies. Yes, she went to college for a long time. She wrote her thesis on "Cai in Welsh Arthurian Legend," hence her fascination with characters who use shiny swords to save the world.
She used to design Filemaker Pro databases for college departments, and actually writes all her books in completely random order in a compulsively organized database (yes, she knows that's strange; it has something to do with finding order amidst the chaos of her imagination).
Her current obsessions are ancient Mesopotamian history and neurology.
Reviews
coming soon.
Learn More
What is romance fiction? [external link]
Who's reading romance? [external link]