It's often said that good things spring from bad, and in Paula Detmer Riggs's case, that's certainly true. Being fired from an executive recruiter position led her to the San Diego library for a little light reading —a love for romance fiction blossomed. Paula has been nurturing that love for nearly twelve years and has written over twenty-five romances.
PDR, as she's known to her friends and fans, is a native of Southwestern Ohio, where she attended Miami University, earning a degree in speech therapy and psychology. The ear that allows her to hear nuances of dialogue, she credits to speech therapy training and the varied life experiences she details in her books, she credits to being the wife of a Naval officer.
Over the years, she has tackled a variety of jobs--an executive recruiter, an admissions officer in a computer school, a sales rep for a collection agency and a dormitory supervisor at a children's home in Brooklyn. All were valuable and sometimes intimidating experiences, adding grist to her writing imagination.
Paula and her husband Carl raised two sons in San Diego. The elder, who has hazel eyes and blond dreadlocks, still lives, with two mellow California cats, at the beach where he works in special education and surfs every day. He's still a bachelor, by the way--and in PDR's unbiased view, a really nice guy.
Their younger son, definitely an Alpha type, who was probably an imperious Scottish laird in a previous life, lives with his patient, darling wife, and two fat cats, on the eastern side of Washington Cascades. Soon, if all goes well, they will provide PDR her first granddaughter.
PDR and her husband, who she met when her former sweetheart played cupid after dumping her on her eighteenth birthday, have lived all over the country and are now happily settled on the oldest plant nursery in Douglas County, Oregon. At last count, they owned two purebred Australian shepherds, Molly and Daisy, a three-legged Siamese/Russian blue cat, Cleo, a psychotic Russian blue, demon- cat, Sketch, and a mini lop bunny, Bun.
