www.wordsbykristinecharles.com
An avid reader since, she says, before she could walk, Kristine’s earliest reading recollection is correcting her parents’ pronunciation of words like stegosaurus, triceratops and tyrannosaurus rex as they read bedtime stories to her from an encyclopaedia of dinosaurs. A love of books about dinosaurs morphed into a love of more magical creatures, including her most-loved folk of the Faraway Tree and, when she couldn’t find enough stories to sate a voracious reading appetite, Kristine decided to write her own.
Kristine has clear recollections of drafting stories about gnomes and elves and pixies while sprawled out on the thin industrial carpet of her year one classroom but, as she got older, her writing habits skewed to the academic. After finishing school, she completed a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Laws, then started working as a corporate lawyer in one of the big city law firms while completing a Master of Dispute Resolution. Later she finished a Master of Human Resources Management and Industrial Relations. She even started a doctorate in constitutional law. She loved to write and spent a lot of time drafting essays and research papers, but the technical writing was never quite enough.
Eventually, she returned to writing fiction but, a little more grown up now, Kristine’s fairy tales veered to the more adult. Starting in primary school, she’d spent time with Judy Blume, moved on to the Sweet Valley High series and eventually resorted to stealing the ‘naughty’ books – including the classics Shirley Conran’s Lace and Judith Krantz’s Princess Daisy – from her mother’s bookshelves. Drawing from amongst her everyday life, it seemed an easy slide into the worlds of contemporary women’s fiction and romance with their stories of successful women finding their men, working hard, creating their lives and living the ups and downs along the way.
Nowadays, Kristine’s shifted her career focus, taking a step back from a management role in one of Australia’s big retail banks, to give herself a little more time and space to write. Her main characters are strong, complex women – lawyers and doctors and bankers – navigating work and life and love in big cities. They’re her friends, the women she meets in her job and the ones she eavesdrops on at the coffee shop (because she’s at the coffee shop a lot!). Her men are sometimes good, sometimes bad but always interesting and mostly (but not always) someone you’d want to take home to meet your parents.
Kristine loves telling tales, exploring relationships and working out just how much pain to inflict, or not inflict, on her main characters before giving them the HEA (or, at least a HFN). She writes, and reads, to escape into other worlds where coffee (and red wine) is abundant, designer shoes and handbags are cheap, chocolate has no calories and men always put the toilet seat down.
You can find Kristine on social media –> FB: @wordsbykristinecharles, T: @wordsbykc and I:@wordsbykristinecharles and can purchase her first published story in the Romance Writers of Australia Anthology here – Spicy Bites Tattoo