Darlene Gardner worked as a newspaper sportswriter for years before realizing she preferred making up quotes to hoping some athlete would say something interesting.
In her past life, she springboarded from covering Penn State football for her college newspaper to working as a features writer for the Charleston Post and Courier before returning to sports writing at the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel.
Her fiction-writing career has been just as varied. Within the Harlequin/Silhouette family, she's written for the Temptation, Duets and Intimate Moments lines but hopes she's found a home with Superromance books. Million to One, her first Superromance book, is an October 2005 release.
Incidentally, Darlene hasn't managed to get away from either the newspaper or sports worlds. Her husband is a longtime journalist. And the athletes, in the form of her two teenagers, now live in her house in northern Virginia.
But any interesting things her children say are more likely to end up in a romance novel than a newspaper story.
