About

I’m Hazel Hart, author of thirteen novels.

I started writing when I was sixteen and needed extra money because I had an eighteen-month-old daughter and my husband worked construction. At the time, I read lots of magazines and noticed fillers, short items like humorous experiences, recipes, opinions, light verse, and other short items that paid five or ten dollars each, so I started writing and submitting. It didn’t happen often, but I did sell my work: light verse to Organic Gardening and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, a recipe to another magazine, a humorous experience to another.

After a few sales, I moved on to short stories. For years, I read confession magazines: True Story, True Romance, Secrets, and others. The magazine racks were full of them in the nineteen sixties and seventies. When I learned that in spite of the name, what I wrote didn’t have to be true, I bought a book on how to write confession stories, learned there was a common pattern for these stories: sin, suffer, and repent. I rolled paper into my typewriter and let my imagination flow.