I have often thought that there are four main factors in a long-lived writing career. Luck, Pluck, Discipline and Talent. You've got control over three of them.

The proof is in my own career. And let me start by saying I'm a very unlikely candidate for writing success, let alone the RWA Centennial Award.

I always told stories. But not always on paper. Like most girls, I played with dolls. In my case, small "Sandra Sue" dolls similar to today's action figures. My friends and I would dress them up and send them off on adventures. When I looked back on those days, I realized I was spinning romantic suspense stories. My dolls were routinely kidnapped by pirates or fabulously wealthy men with their own private islands.

The tales bubbled out of me, but I didn't think I could be a WRITER because I was dyslexic. Spelling was one of my worst subjects, a fact which teachers never let me forget.

After I grew up and had kids, I wanted a job that wouldn't take me away from home. When my local community college ran a seminar for women who wanted to figure out their career choices, I attended and kept coming out high in writing interest and aptitude. When I told my husband I wanted to write an article for the local paper about the seminar, he volunteered to do the spelling part for me. Bless him. He's still proofreading my work.

It blows my mind when I think about someone saying to themselves, "I've never written anything. I think I'll start with a 100,000-word novel." I had to wade in slowly. After that first article, I kept writing for the local papers, then I gradually moved into books. My first novel was a kids' science fiction story, not because I thought writing for kids was easier. Just shorter. I wrote that book in another class I was taking at the community college, read it to the group, revised it many times the way I still do and sent it out myself. After four rejections, an editor at Scholastic wrote me a two-page letter telling me what was wrong with it. I knew it was a good letter, so I revised the book and sold it.

My next fateful career step was getting into romance-via a friend who said the romance market was heating up, and did I want to try one with her. Since I thought neither one of us knew enough about the genre, I asked two other local writers to join us. We plotted the story, broke into teams to write the chapters, and critiqued each other. Our agent sold that book to Silhouette.

From there, it gets even more confusing, partly because I still enjoyed team writing. I worked on various books with two different members of the original team. One major project was a YA series for Pageant.

In the mid-eighties, I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time when Lydia Paglio at Dell was starting a new "women's fiction" program. What she was buying was actually the start of modern romantic suspense, where the romance and suspense each have about half of the book, and they are so entwined that you can't pull out either element and make the plot work.

My next big step was to Harlequin Intrigue, where I first wrote with a partner, then took off on my own under the Rebecca York name. I've written 50 Intrigues now, many for my popular 43 Light Street Series, and many with a paranormal twist. And I was lucky again-to have a fantastic editor, Debra Matteucci, who helped me understand the romantic suspense genre better. I used to hate her ten-page revision letters, but they taught me tons about my craft.

For the past eight years I've also been writing longer books for Berkley, all of which incorporate one of my first loves, paranormal. Those werewolf heroes really turn me on. And now I've also gotten into dragon-shifters. Yes, I've flirted with sexy vampires, but I always come back to shape-shifters.

This is a great time to be a writer, with so many different ways to market your work. In August I've got a sexy fairy tale, DARK MAGIC, coming out from Carina with-surprise-a dragon-shifter. Only this time it's a story set in a medieval fantasy world. And I'm writing a shorter werewolf novel, DARK OF THE MOON, which I plan to publish on Kindle.

Next out will be DARK WARRIOR (yeah, I'm into dark at the moment) from Berkley. And then I've got two Intrigues in January and February, SUDDEN INSIGHT and SUDDEN ATTRACTION, both about sexually linked telepaths.

How do you manage a long career as a writer? As I said, part of it is luck. Being at the right place at the right time-when Dell was getting into romantic suspense. But the other elements are important too. Like not giving up in the face of rejection. Everybody gets rejected. You've got to pick yourself up and keep going.

Perhaps the most important factor is discipline. You have to sit in front of the computer for long hours on a regular basis. My goal is ten pages a day. If you do that day in and day out, you write a lot of books.

For me, the discipline includes writing proposals-so I'll have new work. And writing an outline for my story, so I'll know where I'm going.

Revising is also a big part of the process for me. I used to write slowly and then edit a lot. I realized I could write a first draft quickly-then revise-first on the computer, then on paper.

What's my best advice? Figure out what genre you want to write. Then believe in yourself. And don't look back.