RITA GERLACH | Author, Freelance Writer, Editor, and Authors' Advocate

About Rita
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Biography

Rita began writing around 1989 after attending a family reunion, where her cousin, a famous romance novelist, handed her a copy of one of her books. Having always loved great historical fiction, her heart got racing toward a desire to write. Or she might truly admit that the desire was rekindled. In many of her stories, she writes about the struggles endured by early colonists, with a mixture of both American and English history.

Rita has several writing projects going on right now. Surrender the Wind, a historical novel set in Virginia and England, is now complete, or at least until an editor whips out a red pen and decorates the manuscript with it.

She began writing Beside Two Rivers in late 2006, of which she has several chapters in rough draft, with tons of notes and the story ruminating in her mind. You might be curious about the title. Along the borders of Maryland and Virginia, two rivers converge, the Potomac and the Shenandoah. The story begins there, in a breath-taking setting as the RevolutionaryWar comes to a close.

There are other novels next on her list for revisions, which will be ready for submissions in the near future. These novels were previously POD published and are out of print. Rita also has the beginnings of a historical novel started, entitled Seven Golden Candlesticks.

Her family claims that storytelling is their blood, handed down from centuries of Irish/English/Scot storytellers. Rita believes there just may be something to that theory. As far as there being any famous people in her family, Rita and Nora Roberts are first cousins, and it is Nora that gave her that signed copy at a family reunion.

Five Random Things

1. I was six and in the first grade in the above picture. I wouldn't smile because I had lost my two front teeth. My mother insisted on the 'doo'.

2. I wrote my first short story when I was eleven, about a little girl that found a horse in an abandoned stable in the woods, complete with illustrations.

3. I'm afraid of spiders, especially big, hairy wolf spiders.

4. I like thrift shoping for designer name brands.

5. Once upon a time, I scaled and repelled a one-hundred-foot-high cliff in New Mexico on an outdoor school, built a 'houch' in the woods and slept in it alone for two nights. While thumbing it home, I almost got trampled by a herd of Texas longhorn steer. My husband, Paul, got me over the fence just in time. Ah, the days of foolish youth!