In the beginning...

Margaret Mayo got me thinking about beginnings yesterday.

How we first started writing...what we knew or didn't know...who helped us on the road to publication...

So continuing with that theme, I'll tell you a bit about the first romance I ever wrote.
It was a Harlequin Medical, with a doctor hero and a physiotherapist heroine.
Working as a physiotherapist at the time, I thought it would be easy (and no! It wasn't based on real life experience!) 'Write what you know' and all that...

Well, that book is the only one I've never finished. It sits languishing at around 25K words.
So what happened?

Apparently, working in the medical profession and writing about it were TOO close for me! I started to get bored. I didn't want to write about what I knew. I wanted to escape from all that, from the everyday reality of patients and orthopaedics and cardiac rehab and hydrotherapy.
I wanted to let my imagination roam free.
So I did.
And started writing plots I wanted to write, plots that came to me while mulling over yet another report, while flicking through a magazine at lunch time (my first book, THE TYCOON'S DATING DEAL, was born from a magazine article on speed dating while I was on a short lunch between patients).

So how did you all get started?
What inspired you to write?
Who inspired you to write?
Would love to hear your stories.
And there's a book in it for a randomly chosen response (numbered responses with a bit of scrunched paper picked out by my preschooler!), just because it's Christmas and I'm getting into the swing of the giving thing. :)