About

Meet Terry Odell, Author

I was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, a rare native for many years. I graduated from UCLA, and worked in the LA County secondary school system, teaching junior high school science, until we moved to Florida.

I can’t remember learning to read, only that I always did. My parents tell people they had to move from our first home because I finished the library. Learning to write is another story. In some ways, I’ve always been a writer—I just never put the words on paper. Most of my ideas were based on books or television shows or movies I thought I could “improve” with my own plot or character changes. But my ‘real’ writing was usually more technical. I wrote curriculum or training manuals.

I discovered fan fiction, which was a great training ground once I decided I could handle all the boring typing mechanics. Writing dialogue with all those commas and quotation marks in the right places was a major headache—too much work. I could enjoy my stories in my head and not have to do all that technical stuff.

But, one weekend, when I was home alone, I decided to try to rework a story that had been rattling around in my head for years. It had started as a vague MacGyver story, but turned into a Highlander one, because that was what I was reading at the time. I sent it to someone whose work I’d been editing, and she gently guided me through fixing my hack mistakes.

The gauntlet had been thrown. There were ‘rules’ I had to learn, and since I had no more wall space for needlepoint, writing became a challenge and a new creative outlet. My stories were well-received in the Highlander fandom world, but I wanted to try writing original characters.

I discovered a writing group at iVillage, but found the short story format very hard to master. I’d write a beginning, a middle, and more and more middle, so I moved to novels where I could develop the characters in more depth and finally get to a satisfying ‘the end.’ Ironically, my first publications were short stories, with no mystery whatsoever.

An avid mystery reader, I thought I’d try writing a mystery, but as my daughters pointed out, it was more of a romance. (Mom, she noticed his brown eyes were flecked with hazel on page 10. It’s a romance!) I realized that even when reading a mystery, I was captivated by the relationships between the characters – Faye Kellerman’s Rina and Peter, Barbara Parker’s Gail and Anthony, even Laurie R. King’s Mary and Sherlock. Even in books without continuing relationships, I was still watching characters hook up more than paying attention to the crime—on the first read. Of course, this means I read almost every book twice; once for the relationship, once for the mystery.

I joined the Romance Writers of America and its Central Florida chapter, to learn about the other side of writing—the business side—as I moved to the next step: getting my work off my hard drive and out where others can see it. Since then, we’ve moved from Florida to the mountains of Colorado where I love looking out my windows at the wildlife as I write.