About Vella
As a child living in an isolated mining/logging community in a Northern California forest, Vella divided her time between reading and exploring the wilderness with her younger sister. She has always wanted to put words on paper. Her first work consisted of comic books about the Lone Ranger’s horse Silver. Sadly, she never found a publisher for those amazing titles.
After college, she dove into longer work, specifically an adventure tale about five mountain men. She soon learned that having the men repeatedly be attacked by bears or get caught in blizzards wasn’t enough. She should have included characterization, plot, and conflict. Ah well. Vital lesson learned.
When her first child was born, she became a stay-at-home mom. Because her baby was a lousy communicator and there really weren’t any neighbors she wrote. And wrote some more. She remembers the day she sold her first fiction, that excited dance around the living room with her son staring at her in confusion while tears streamed. Short stories evolved into romances for Harlequin, earning her twenty-two contracts and enough money to justify staying home. Then the need to stretch herself surfaced. When she shared her frustration, her then agent said, “You live in a national historic landmark, write historicals.”
“But I’m not into history,” she protested. Still, the agent’s suggestion had her researching where she lived which happened to be where gold was discovered in Oregon. She didn’t particularly care about settlers or gold miners but the Native Americans whose worlds were irrevocably changed by newcomers spoke to her. Changed her.
Ancient Native Americans believed that the land, sky, sun, moon, trees, rivers, plains, and deserts had souls. Because she’d grown up in the mountains, Vella understood on a deep level what resonated with them.
The majority of Vella’s more than 150 fiction books speak to her love of nature. That love deeply impacted her Native American historicals as well as both of her contemporary Montana romance series and the stand alone romance Death Chant.
Hopi spirituality plays a major role in her paranormal thriller/suspense series called Feral Justice.
Vella credits her grandfather, pioneering pulp fiction writer Homer Eon Flint with the compulsion to write. She wrote his biography and called it Grandfather Lost. Sadly, he was murdered when her mother was five. How she’d love to have known him!
She’s a widow, mother to two sons, grandmother to four, and owned by two rescue dogs. She loves gardening and going for walks but hates shopping.
Inspirations
