Montreal in 1967 was an eye-popping city for a young nerdess from Ontario suburbia. There was the swinging world’s fair “Expo ‘67,” French joie de vivre done Quebec free-style, and sexy Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. But I was there for a serious purpose. I’d come to the National Theatre School of Canada for classical theatre training. NTS accepts just fifteen or so acting students each year, and by audition only. I was smugly ecstatic to have made the cut.

How do you make God laugh? Make a plan. After studying Shakespeare and Moliere, Congreve and Shaw in preparation for a “distinguished stage career,” I spent the next twenty years mostly on TV: made-for-TV movies, series, sit-coms, and soap opera. Plus I did over a hundred TV and radio commercials. To this day, some fellow in a supermarket line or a waitress serving me coffee will say, “I remember you! The Woolco ads!” I enjoyed all the TV work. I also did many stage plays. I loved being an actor.

(I’m glad people now use “actor” to include both male and female performers. We don’t say “doctoress, lawyeress, teacheress” so why “actress?” Think the Academy Awards will ever join the twenty-first century by replacing the phrase “best actress?” Note: this verbal gripe is notwithstanding my use of “nerdess” above. As mark Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”)

A few highlights from my acting days:

	“Vanities” with Dawn Wells of “Gilligan’s Island” (Stage West, Edmonton)
“Ring Around the Moon” with Thayer David (Seattle Repertory Theatre)
	“A Flea In Her Ear” with Wenna Shaw (Citadel Theatre, Edmonton)
“Chapter Two” (Bayview Playhouse, Toronto)
	On the set of “The Campbells” TV series
“High Hopes” daytime drama series
“High Hopes” cover of TV Times, with Bruce Gray
	“Nuggets” award-winning children’s TV series
At home with my daughter and husband (my best role)

In the late 1980’s I began writing fiction. My first efforts were awful: pretentious short stories with high-flown language and no point (worse, no drama.) But I learn fast. I finally wrote a good short story, Nightshoot. It won 1st prize in the 1989 Dorothy Shoemaker Literary Award Competition. That same year the Canada Council for the Arts awarded me a grant that allowed me to take a sabbatical from acting to write my first novel, Heresy.

I’ll be forever grateful for that support. Like everyone, I hate paying taxes, but other people’s taxes gave me the break to write the book that launched my writing career, so to my fellow Canadians I say, “Thank you.” (And I hope that, in turn, my annual contributions to the public purse are now helping another fledgling artist.)

I worked for three years on Heresy, learning as I wrote. (Translation: steeling myself to hack apart draft after draft until I’d finally crafted a book good enough to send to agents.) Set in the court of King Henry VIII, Heresy featured Honor Larke, a (fictional) ward of (the real) Sir Thomas More. More was a brilliant scholar and a loving father, but as chancellor of England he banned books and burned men. The story turns on Honor’s passionate conflict with her once-beloved guardian as she tries to save More’s victims.

Luckily, Heresy attracted the interest of Albert Zuckerman, a top New York agent. Al has been my agent ever since. I can’t speak highly enough of him. He helps me create every new book, from outline to final draft, generously sharing his literary wisdom and book-business savvy. There are two people I rely on to write my novels: Al, and my husband, Stephen. They both tell the truth, nothing but the truth.

Al sold Heresy to Penguin USA. They published it under their Onyx imprint, but not before insisting on a title change. “No one would know what ‘heresy’ means,” they told me. (At which I thought, Wow, the dumbing-down of our culture has hit a knuckle-dragging low.) So, my big-themed historical epic was published as A Dangerous Temptation with a sweet, romance-type cover, and A Dangerous Devotion, a sequel set during the brutal Wyatt rebellion against Queen Mary, came out the following year with equally sweet cover art.

I decided to write thrillers. My thinking was: they can’t put flowers on the cover. Not that I’m bitter, you understand. I’m not a vengeful person. Although I do confess to wreaking my share of havoc in my novels. At last count, I’ve killed 27 really nice characters who weren’t doing a thing wrong, 19 nasty types who were, and 430,000 innocent bystanders. I’ve burned them at the stake and hanged them. I’ve drained their blood with hemorrhagic fevers, and zapped their brains with electrical eruptions from space-based missions gone awry. I’ve tortured them to death and driven them to suicide. A healthy outlet, don’t you think? But there may be a price: my husband warns of a purgatory in store for me, where the souls of all the innocent characters I’ve murdered will hound me until the end of time.

Warner Books published my first thriller, Beyond Recall, in 2000 and I was delighted with the big promotion they gave it. Bus and subway ads in New York, Chicago, Washington, etc. Full-page ads in Publishers Weekly. (“Beyond Chrichton, Beyond Cook, Beyond Recall.”) Over 110,000 copies of Beyond Recall have been sold. Warner went on to publish my next two books, After Shock followed the next year by The Experiment, which Publishers Weekly praised as a “…haunting thriller. Kyle keeps the cinematic action scenes and nail-biting suspense rolling throughout.”

So, that’s how my acting career morphed into a writing career. Acting is a cheery communal enterprise and actors love to be with people. Writing is solitary work done in a small, silent room. Call me crazy, but I thoroughly enjoyed the first world, and now I love the second. Of course, they’re both imaginary worlds, which is darn close to a definition of crazy. As long as readers like the books, I’ll keep mad-hattering on.