Reyna Rios/Raine Hollister

Reyna Rios sold her first book to Silhouette six weeks after she submitted it. That book, Exception to the Rule, was an Intimate Moments published under the pseudonym Raine Hollister and set in her birthplace of Brownsville, Texas, was a real winner. A week after she sold it, she found out it was an RWA® Golden Heart finalist, and later it made the Waldenbooks Best Seller list. Not bad for a first try.To say Reyna has a varied background is putting it mildly. She has worked in banking and the oil business and has been employed by politicians and lawyers, even the City Attorney. She has portrayed a juror in a movie filmed in Houston and was a murder suspect in a play, Murder My Sweet. And, oh yes, did we say she was also once the vice president of a bullfight club?

Naturally, Reyna has been very involved with RWA® (a member since 1983), joining both the Northwest and West Houston chapters and serving as an officer in both.

“I once heard that whatever one reads voraciously as a young adult is what he/she should probably write,” Reyna says. “I hit a creative spurt when I was 12 years old. I wrote poems, songs, short stories, and plays. My first short story, which I titled The Hand, was a suspense about an evil doctor who unleashed this creeping hand out into the world. Some years later, a movie about a creepin hand starring Michael Caine was filmed. I often wondered if someone had found my masterpiece and sold it to Hollywood.”

Does this mean we can expect a gothic or romantic suspense from Reyna some day? Time will tell. For now she is excited to be writing novels depicting her Hispanic heritage for Kensington’s Encanto line.

Reyna lives in Houston with her husband and daughter, who by now have probably gotten used to dealing with her book deadlines. “I ask my family, ‘Do you want to eat out or starve in?’” she says.

Anyone who corresponds with her on the e-links knows she’s an animal lover, but she also loves music and watching romantic comedies of the forties and fifties. What she loes most, though, is “breathing life into my characters and sharing them with my readers.