An Author’s Fierce Fight Against Ovarian Cancer
Heather McCollum
Story by: Lydia Dodson
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Photographer: Keith Foster
Culture
Being a writer and book enthusiast, I’m always a little more excited when I’m asked to interview an author. I love the chance to meet fellow writers and learn about new worlds I can disappear into. But Heather McCollum is so much more than an author. She is a motivator. A survivor. A believer. A romantic. An achiever. Talking with her was like comfortably chatting with an old friend. Her story is one that needs a voice. Heather started out pursuing a career in biology at the University of Maine. It was there she met her husband, a fellow Biology Major. She traveled to North Carolina to further her biology studies toward a PhD in Cellular Immunology. She soon learned that working in a lab alone was not for her and went to work at a drug development company running clinical trials. But Biology was not her only passion. “Every night I would come home exhausted from the rat race, and I would write.” Heather is a devoted romantic who dreams of chivalrous Scotsman and vibrant love stories. These stories sprang to life.
into the publishing business. It’s a lot of networking, a huge amount of persistence, and then some luck thrown in there and of course some talent.” Heather’s talent and persistence met that stroke of luck in 2009 when she finaled in the prestigious Golden Hearts. As Heather puts it “The Golden Hearts are like the Emmys for unpublished writers in romance. It was a huge deal. I dropped down on the floor sobbing I was so happy…there is literally a red carpet.” After finalling in the Golden Hearts, Heather started to get the interest of editors. She sold one of her books to Wild Rose Press and pitched another to an agent who quickly fell in love with it and linked Heather with Entangled Publishing. This success led Heather to now have two thriving published series, The Dragonfly Chronicles and the Highland Heart Series, two historical romance series that pull the reader into faraway lands of love and mystery.
But then two years ago life gave Heather a shove back into the real world away from her beloved romantic lands, and she started on a journey that It wasn’t until after Heather and her husband had would change her life forever. It was a simple evehad three children that she was finally given the ning just like any other playing on her adult league opportunity to spend more time with the characters soccer team. After suffering a hard hit to the hand, she envisioned. The cost of daycare became too Heather went to the doctor suspecting it might be high and she left her job to stay home with her chil- broken. While at the doctor she figured she’d kill dren and focus on her writing. Now that she had two birds with one stone and mentioned some odd more time, Heather entered contests and sought symptoms she’d been experiencing. Nothing too to get her books published. “It’s very hard to break out of the ordinary. A twinge of abdominal pain.
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