Mayo Lucas

I invented fan fiction.

Yes, I did.

At age 12, I wrote my first book based on the characters and premise of the old TV western, Wagon Train. Soon I was writing “episodes” for other shows I liked, and reading them aloud to my best friend and bus mate on the way to school each morning. The stories were all a bit smarmy—perfect for two teenaged girls.

I was already a voracious reader of all things Victorian--Austen, the Bronte sisters, Dickens, plus Twain and Alcott for this side of the Atlantic; and, in an odd juxtaposition, I read every last one of the Hardy Boys mysteries.

About that same age, I read Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. I was enthralled…and decidedly pissed off when Rhett left Scarlett. Then and there I decided to become a writer so I could make things turn out the way I wanted.

It was my eccentric Great Aunt Evelyn who played a pivotal role in furthering that ambition. We didn’t meet until I was a hostile, anti-social 13-year old writing stories of a girl spy for the WWII TV show, Combat. I refused to come out of my room during her visit, so she came knocking on my door. Deep in my method-muse, I opened the door a crack and eyed her with silent suspicion. Finally, ungraciously, I let her in and returned to my writing. Unperturbed, she perched on the side of my bed beneath her haphazard pile of hair, and won me over by waiting a bit before asking what I was doing. I grudgingly told her, all the while shielding my paper from view (you know, in case she tried to copy me). Her face lit up as she confessed, “Oh! I write stories, too!” That was it. Instant pals.

When she died years later, my cousins received all sorts of lovely things from her estate—jewelry, candlesticks, silver. I received none of that. Instead, without any advance word, a truck pulled up in the street outside my house. Two men unloaded crates, boxes and a thick manilla envelope, all addressed to me. They contained her desk and chair, her portable Royal typewriter…and the originals of all her short stories. She’d remembered! And she believed in me!

A few weeks later, I started writing Matters of the Heart on that clackety, old typewriter. I’d already been struggling to understand some scenes that were flashing through my head and keeping me up at night. Incipient schizophrenia? I wondered. Or just a story waiting to be told? Since the first would require extensive therapy, a life of heavy meds and doubtful access to fashion, I decided on “story.”

When Matters of the Heart was finished, I was already a member of Romance Writers of America (RWA), so I entered the manuscript in their national Golden Heart Contest. While I didn’t win, making it to 4th place helped my agent, Oscar, sell the book to Avon. Right behind that, he sold Camelot Jones on proposal. By the time I was proofing the galleys for that, Oscar was retiring, and my life had already swooped around a corner and taken off in a completely different direction.

I worked on my third book, Dealer’s Choice, in dribs and drabs, sold some pieces to a local girls’ magazine, and kept my head in the game by giving lectures and teaching night classes on writing. I even judged in the Golden Heart Contest one year. Eventually though, my day job starved enough oxygen from the writing life that I put it aside.
Now, after years of running a Human Resources Dept. for an engineering firm, I've returned to my first love—writing!

Dealer’s Choice is finally finished—and it’s a great read you can sink your teeth into! I’m currently shopping it around as I look for a new agent. At the same time, I’m writing my next several books (perhaps I’m a professional schizophrenic after all) and also building my online presence.