She got her hands on a woman's magazine when she was eleven years old and saw her first height/weight chart. It was the first time she thought that something was wrong with her. It was the segue in the cycle of dieting that would last for the next twenty-two years.

She cut back and she skipped dinner. When those didn't work, she moved on to the Rice diet, the Ice Cream diet and the Grapefruit diet. Ballard took laxatives and occasionally made herself throw up.

The most extreme diet she tried was the Mayo Clinic in her late teens. Because the body goes through a ketosis on this diet, it is only supposed to be two weeks long. Ballard says she made it through the first week before her body shut down and she began weeping and shaking for no reason, so she stopped the diet. When she tried the diet a second time, the same thing happened and her mother told her never to go on it again.

Ballard says that when her son, an only child, was three years old, she joined Weight Watchers. Though she lost sixty pounds in ten months, she was miserable the entire time. "If the average housewife needs 2,000 calories to do her chores, why should I be expected to do mine on 1,200 calories just because I get fat on 2,000?"

After a lot of soul-searching, she knew that if she was going to have the energy to keep up with and enjoy her very active son, she was going to need more fuel. It was then that she made the decision to stop dieting. "Just the thought made me weak with nervousness!" she says. "I also made up my mind to eat healthily, exercise moderately and learn to love the body that developed."

In her early 20s, her two sisters got tired of hearing her say that she was going to write a romance novel. "One day, they handed me a spiral pad and pen and said, 'Prove it. Do it.'" She would write a chapter and give it to them to read and they would be after her to write another chapter and that's where she learned the importance of ending each chapter with a cliffhanger to keep the reader hooked. Her novella was called "To Wed A Stranger." She sent it to a magazine and it was rejected. A few years later, she added to it and turned it into a novel.

After she'd stopped dieting and began accepting herself, she started feeling good about herself and life. Ballard realized that she was getting way more compliments than she ever did when she kept trying to mould herself to society's perfect woman. Aware that "big girls" don't get any romantic roles in the movies, on television or in books, one day the preverbal lightbulb went off over her head. She was going to write romance novels with Big Beautiful Heroines.

Ballard was never satisfied with her first novella-turned-novel, so when she realized the novels she wanted to write, she rewrote it, fattened up the heroine and renamed it. "The story that had been around so long finally became 'His Brother's Child,'" a current novel.

In her teens, Ballard discovered Emily Loring's romance novels. She enjoyed these novels because they weren't just boy meets girl; they also had good life messages. That was when she knew she wanted to write romance novels that had a feel-good message in them and she's also a real romantic at heart, so it's just natural that she writes for the genre.

People have preconceived notions as to what an author looks like, how they act and what their morals and values are. Ballard says that this is even more true for an author of romance novels. "Men are the worst," she says. "They get this little gleam in their eyes and I can just see them making up their own stories!" Ballard made up her mind a long time ago that everyone has their own set of rules they're judging her by and since there's no way she can please them all, she just smiles and tells them that she keeps her love scenes spicy but classy.

"Vogue," "Cosmo," "Teen People" and "Glamour" are just a few magazines showcasing skinny women on their covers. "My heart just hurts when I see the role models that are influencing our women - especially our young girls. I wonder how many more young girls will head down the long road of eating disorders and maybe even death. I've taken on a lot of magazines by writing letters to the editors and shaming them for what they're doing," says Ballard.

"I wish I could convince every person alive to just remember: Each of us is a wonderful one-of-a-kind work of art. There never has been, nor will there ever be another person like us. We need to stop trying to look like someone we were never genetically programmed to look like and learn to love the body we're in."

Ballard currently has two more books in the works; her first nonfiction book, "10 Steps to Loving Your Body," and another romantic suspense, "The Best Man." She hopes to have them finished in a few weeks and by Fall, respectively.

Read my review on Pat Ballard's novel, Abigail's Revenge...

Visit Pat Ballard's website Pat's Place for more about her romance novels with big beautiful heroines.