The article below appeared in The Record, in New Jersey, August 22, 2003. Reprinted with permission.
By Trudy Walz, Staff Writer
On the road to publication, Nancy Herkness walked a mile in Kate Chilton’s shoes.
Well, almost — 4,760 feet.
“I actually walked the George Washington Bridge to figure out if what I wanted to do was feasible,” the 46-year-old Glen Ridge author says of her debut romance novel, A Bridge to Love. “I sort of used the walk to formulate how the scene would flow.”
The scene is the climax of the novel; Chilton is its heroine. But the GWB isn’t the only bridge in the book.
Chilton is an engineer who designs and builds one. However, she also discovers that her late husband had an affair and meets another possible love interest, which requires her to build other bridges — a bridge of trust, a bridge to the future.
“I enjoyed the fact that I could use it in a real sense and a metaphorical sense,” said Herkness, whose own plan to follow in her engineer father’s footsteps was tripped up by calculus. “My original title was ‘Building Bridges,’ but they wanted a title that was more romantic.”
Unlike her heroine, Herkness is a happily married mother of two whose transformation into paperback writer — Bridge landed on bookstore shelves this month — is the subject of talks she’s hosting Saturday at Borders in Fort Lee and Thursday at Watchung Booksellers in Montclair.
It was a transformation that began after she received a degree in English from Princeton, made forays into other fields — retail management (“I loved clothes and loved to shop”) and systems analysis — and tied the knot with Jeff Theodorou. At Theodorou’s urging, she quit her job and wrote a manuscript, but before she could try to sell it, her daughter, Rebecca, arrived. Herkness didn’t return to writing until her youngest, Loukas, now 11, began first grade.
After finishing her second manuscript, Herkness said, she met a mystery writer who advised her to join the writers’ organization for her genre — in her case, the Romance Writers of America. That group and its local chapter, the New Jersey Romance Writers, are “treasure troves” of information and were instrumental in helping to get her work into print, she said.
“For me, the biggest problem is finding the time to do it,” Herkness said of her craft. “When I can get those two or three hours in a day, I am just a happy person.”
She also has a trick to overcome writer’s block.
“I walk the dog” — the family’s 10-year-old golden retriever, Max.
Since publication, Herkness says, life is busier —line-editing her next book (Shower of Stars), answering e-mails, and traveling for signings and discussions, in addition to caring for her kids, husband and home.
Rebecca, 13 and “a voracious reader,” is now eagerly awaiting her 16th birthday when Mom deems she will be old enough to read A Bridge to Love.
Loukas, on the other hand, “is very happy not to read it, because he thinks kissing is gross,” Herkness said.
And she’s become a kind of celebrity in Glen Ridge, where the family settled 16 years ago.
“My husband went to the town pool and said there were people reading my book all over the place.”