Fifteen Authors In Fifteen Minutes

Write down here the names of the first fifteen romance authors that have influenced your reading the most.  Just write the names down without thinking too much; whether you hate them now or still enjoy their works, their writing styles and stories are what will always be your favorite go-to themes.  You'll start to dig deeper after the first six names or so, but you mustn't analyze too much! Just keep writing down the names as they appear on your mind.

Me:

Linda Howard
Nora Roberts
Rosemary Rogers
Laurell K. Hamilton
Ann Rice
Christine Feehan
Helen Bianchin
Merline Lovelace
Iris Johannsen
Susan Johnson
Christina Dodd
Katherine Sutcliffe
Anne Stuart
Carolyn Jewel
Debra Dixon

***
The first three names are easy enough.  Linda Howard opened the world to me to the possibilities of different types of romance stories, besides the usual contemporaries.  Her name is coupled with Nora in my head because I collected their stuff incessantly when I re-started my romance with the genre. 

Rogers' Sweet Savage Love was the probably the first "single title" historical I ever read in the seventies, after a steady diet of Mills and Boons (series romance).  That I remembered the story, the title, and the author in the 90s, twenty years after reading it and fifteen years after I dropped out of reading romances, proved how influential this book was of my reading.  I've reread it in the 90s and can't say that I enjoyed the experience as much as when I was an impressionable teen, but there were certain scenes that still riveted me, and even the horrifying and disgusting ones were still WTH-must-have-gone-thru'-my-teenage-mind worthy.

I know Ann Rice isn't a romance author but there were romantic elements in her books that started my love of the dark, vampire genre, and definitely influenced me into imagining the world of the vampire differently. 

You'll also notice that once you come up with a name, another name pops up that is connected to the one before, suggesting that you're attracted to these clusters because of certain similarities.  For example, my writing down LKH immediately brought up Ann Rice, and then Christine Feehan, back-to-back-to-back, even though I read these authors years apart.  This, to me, shows my awareness of how these three authors built on my fascination with the vampire genre. 

Sutcliffe brought up Stuart, showing how I tie these two authors--dark stories, dark heros.  I'm still trying to figure out why Bianchin gave me Lovelace as next, since they aren't similar in style or story at all.

So, come on, let's see your list!  I know many of you will probably name more recent authors because YES I AM ANCIENT when it comes to reading romance.  The exercise is fun because it bunches together past and present writers.  I was very surprised by the appearance of Carolyn Jewel, for instance.  I do love her writing, but never would have put her ahead of a few of my other favorite authors, but on second thought, yeah, I've always had a thing about the way she writes her heros ;-).  Which, of course, brings me Anne Stuart, the queen of my heros.

TADA.

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