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NTRWA December 2004 Spotlight On...
LESLIE
KING
by Juliet Burns
Leslie King
has squeezed a lot of living into her thirty years. Born in Sherman, TX and raised in Collinsville, just North of Denton,
Leslie was an only child who always seemed mature beyond her age. At six,
her parents divorced, but her grandmother and mother remained a steady
and powerful influence in her life.
When
she was nineteen, a high school friend introduced her to an Army buddy
who’d been stationed in Germany with him. Leslie hated him
on sight. So, naturally, 8 months later they started dating. And 3 months
after that, they were married. Leslie’s most romantic memory is when her
husband got down on his knees at her Aunt’s house to propose, complete
with uniform and flowers. Of course, all she could think about was the
stain he was putting on her aunt’s white carpet from his boot black.
Almost before the ink had dried on her marriage license, she’d been
uprooted to Fort Sill, OK. Four years later, they
moved again. And again. Shy by nature, moving was always hard on Leslie,
but the worst part of Army life was watching her husband ship off to
Korea--still a very dangerous place--for a year’s tour. Now that Sergeant
First Class James King has been made a Station Commander, she’s glad to
have finally settled down and they’ve recently bought a house in Northeast Fort Worth which she’s decorated
beautifully.
Interior Decorator, radio disc jockey, corporate spy, Web Designer, and
hat creaser to stars such as Dwight Yoakam, John Michael Montgomery, and
Chris LeDoux: Leslie has held numerous jobs in the last 10 years. But
she’s always been a writer at heart.
All her life she made up stories and sometimes even wrote them down. But
she didn’t start writing “seriously” until the summer of 2000. In that
year, her short contemporary, A TO Z won the
Ticket To Write contest, and
another contemporary, THE PUCK STOPS HERE placed third in the
Peninsula RWA® contest. In 2001, her
historical, THE LEGEND, also finaled in the
Molly contest. She’s currently working on a romantic
suspense comedy in the tradition of Janet Evanovich. Her heroine is a
Repo woman who gets mixed up with a Bounty Hunter.
Driven and impatient, she will work on a project to the exclusion of all
else until it is completed. And luckily for NT she worked round the
clock for 3 days straight in the summer of 2003 to design our website so
we could make our July deadline. Completely self-taught, Leslie now
designs more than 15 web sites.
When asked, Leslie said this quote by Calvin Coolidge pretty much summed
up her entire outlook on life. As 2004 draws to a close, I believe this
is a message we can all take to heart.
“Press on: Nothing in the world can take the place of perseverance.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with
talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education
will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and
determination alone are omnipotent. Press on!”
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