Kelly Jamison

I was an author probably from sixth grade on. Sixth grade was when I got to do my favorite assignment, take the week's ten spelling words and write a story including all of them. Boy, I loved doing that assignment better than I loved lunch or recess. It was pure bliss.

In college I wrote humorous greeting cards for Hallmark as a free-lancer. Talk about more fun.

Graduation brought a job at a tiny newspaper south of St. Louis, Missouri, so small that we had to borrow a camera from the woman who lived next door to the newspaper office. I covered odds and ends, from church socials (where they sent me back to the office with fried chicken) to city council meetings (where I once watched the sheriff try to burn off a hanging thread on his pants and catch his pants on fire).

We moved to Quincy, Illinois, and I got a job on the local paper. I covered a range of things from nursing home pageants (One contestant was asked what she looked for in a friend, and she replied, "Pie.") to fires, police reports, sports and obituaries.

I decided to try my luck writing fiction and quit the paper to work at home. I wrote quite a few stories for confession magazines, much to my mother-in-law's horror, and stories for the small literary magazines, where I won an Illinois Literary Award for Fiction. Friends were reading romances, so I gave them a shot. I ended up publishing 12 romances for Berkley's Second Chance at Love under the pen name Kelly Adams and 10 for Harlequin/Silhouette as Kelly Jamison. One of them was a finalist for Best Short Romance in the Romance Writers of America contest.

I had always been fascinated by mystery and murder, so it was time for another change. I started writing mysteries under the name Linda Ross and publishing them myself on Kindle. I don't have to follow specific guidelines as I did as a romance writer, and I still get to be funny while putting together a puzzle. The best of all worlds.

In my spare time I'm a painter, mostly of watercolors, and I'm a signature member of the Watercolor Honor Society as well as the Pennsylvania Watercolor Society. I've been juried into regional, national and international shows and have won numerous awards.