Harper Vane

Most people assume I grew up somewhere warm, somewhere with a coastline, when they read my books. Sports romance readers picture beach towns and stadium lights. So it always gets a laugh when I tell them I actually grew up behind the counter of my family's roadside museum in South Dakota, home to (allegedly) the world's largest ball of hand-knotted yarn, thirty miles from the nearest stoplight.

I spent my childhood giving the same fifteen-minute tour to strangers fifty times a day, learning exactly where to pause for effect and when to let a detail land. My dad calls it "the family trade." We even had a game we played on slow afternoons: seeing who could invent the most convincing fake fact about the exhibits without a tourist catching on. I was very, very good at it.

Curling showed up almost by accident. Our local high school team used to duck into the museum to warm up between practices, and I'd eavesdrop on their arguments about ice conditions and line calls as though they were the most riveting thing in the world—which, it turned out, they were. That's how I fell in love with sports, storytelling, and writing.

These days, I still live forty minutes from that same museum, though my best writing happens at my kitchen table with a thermos of gas-station coffee, the same brand I grew up selling to tourists on their way to Mount Rushmore.