O
ne doesn’t normally equate the small, quiet towns of Southeast Texas with “romance.” The flat, marshy fields and refineries dotting the landscape aren’t likely to remind anyone of the epic Civil War love story of Gone with the Wind or Titanic’s tragic coupling of Jack and Rose. To local contemporary romance author Sharla Lovelace, however, that’s not the case. “I just love reading small town stories,” she said when we spoke over the phone to discuss her writing career. “There’s always the quirky funny things that go on in small towns.” Lovelace, who was born, raised, and currently lives in Port Neches, published her first book, The Reason is You, in 2012, and in just five years, she has gone on to release eleven more books. Her productivity is a result of a regimen of discipline and consistency where, after working full-time during the week, she returns home, to a private cottage her husband built for her in their backyard, to write for a couple more hours in the evenings and on weekend mornings. But it’s a labor of love: “I call writing my career, and then my job pays the bills,” she said with a chuckle. The road to a publishing career wasn’t exactly simple, though. Growing up, Sharla had always written something, from poetry to short stories, and was an avid reader, devouring book after book checked out through the local library’s summer reader program. It wasn’t until she owned a bookstore that she caught the “bug,” joining an online writing group and working on her craft there. “As I got more serious about it, I thought, ‘I’ll try to write a book,’ and so I wrote this big monster book, awful thing, that will never see the light of day. But I learned from it,” Lovelace recounted. Eight months later, she finished writing another book that would be her first published work, but it took two years before she could find an agent, and another two months before securing a book deal with a publisher. “It took a couple of years to actually figure out what I was doing, and there’s a lot of rejections when you start out,” she advised. “You just have to take that and roll with it and get better and…hopefully, eventually, then you get a yes.” Her persistence paid off, as her books have garnered multiple awards and her readership continues to grow with each new release. Part of the appeal of her stories is undoubtedly because of their being set in Texas. After some urging by her agent to emphasize the Texan aspects of one of her books, the setting stuck. But, to Sharla, her Texas is not the same as what most people think of when they read about the Lone Star State. “I will say my Texas is not the twangy November/December 2017
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