Val Daniels

VAL DANIELS/ALFIE THOMPSON

wrote her first romance in the sixth grade, when her teacher told the class to transform a short story about a bear attack into a play. Val/Alfie changed it to a romance by bringing a neighboring family to visit the isolated farm. The son, the main character in the original story, saved the neighbor's daughter from the bear gave him the courage to declare his affection for her. In Val/Alfie's current stories, the heroes and heroines are older and wiser, and their problems are not bears, but the romantic endings remain the same...happily ever after.

Her first "we're buying your book" telephone call came in December 1989 and that first book was a Christmas story, published the following Christmas by Harlequin. Is it any wonder that she loves Christmas for more than the usual reasons? Since then, writing as Val Daniels, she has sold 9 books to Harlequin/Silhouette, including 8 Romances (2 of them Christmas themed), 1 Shadows (romantic suspense) and 1 Special Edition (longer contemporary romance). Her books have been published in 29 languages and 32 countries and more than 5 million copies of her books are in print.

Running Press (a division of Perseus) published her first non-fiction book on learning to write fiction by watching movies. Lights! Camera! Fiction! A Movie Lovers Guide to Writing a Novel by Alfie Thompson is available from the usual online booksellers and will be available soon as an ebook. Eight out of ten of her romances are available as ebooks, with a new series (The Bridges of Madison County) coming in 2012.

Alfie has given writing workshops from New York City to Hawaii and served for five years on Romance Writers of America's Board of Directors. As national conference chair in 1990, she initiated the first ever "Readers For Life" literacy book signing which has raised over a three quarters of a million dollars for Literacy since its inception.

Val/Alfie lives in Kansas with her husband, Dan, and a Lucy dog.