Sarah Mayberry was born in Melbourne and currently lives in Auckland, New Zealand.  She has always wanted to be a writer, and holds a BA in Professional Writing.  She started her career as a magazine editor then shifted to television in the Year 2000. She has since worked as a storyliner, scriptwriter and story editor on Neighbours, and as a storyliner and story editor on Shortland Street, New Zealand’s most popular drama. Sarah has always been a romance reader, and has made several submissions to Harlequin over the years.  She credits the acceptance of her first book to the help of her insightful editor, Wanda Ottewell, and to the story crafting skills she learnt on the “table of pain” at Neighbours.

"Getting the call from my editor in Canada, Wanda, to say that Harlequin was buying Can't Get Enough for its Blaze line was one of the best moments of my life. There was much whooping and hollering that day as my partner, Chris, and I ran around the house. 

Writing Can't Get Enough was a real labour of love.  I had submitted several books to Harlequin over the years, but although my rejection letters were increasingly encouraging, I was still unpublished.  It wasn't until I started working on the story table at the TV drama Neighbours that I realised where I had been going wrong.  Soap dramas have perfected the art of mining all the little nuances in relationships, and I suddenly understood that my previous characters had all been too damned clairvoyant about how the other person was feeling.  The excitement in romance is not knowing what the other person is thinking, in my opinion.  So, using my hard-won new knowledge, I sat down to write again. 

I have to thank Neighbours for the inspiration for my characters, too.  As a storyliner, my job was essentially to sit at a table in a small, enclosed, completely unglamorous room with four other people and say "what happens next?" By the end of the week, we had to come up with approximately 90 drama scenes to fill five half-hour episodes - that's 90 points of conflict, or romance, or comedy, or trauma, or mystery, or…  You get the picture. As you can imagine, things would sometimes get a little…silly. 

To feed the greedy TV story machine, it was essential that we all be prepared to offer up stories from our own experiences. I have very fond memories of laughing myself to the point of nausea.  That kind of environment creates intimacy between people very quickly, sort of like a weird, dysfunctional family.  So when someone left the story table and a new person came on board, there was always a definite period of "who are you? And what have you done with my old buddy who used to sit in that chair?" But what I learned during my two years on the show and several cycles of storyliners was that everyone, no matter what your first impression, has their reasons for being the way they are.  Be it disastrous parents, or the death of a sibling, or some other formative moment in their lives - if you talk long enough, you always find the humanity in the other person. 

This basic concept inspired my initial idea: what if two people who hated each other were trapped in an elevator together for several hours and forced to get to know one another?  Originally, I wanted to spend almost the whole book in the elevator, but I started to worry about my characters needing to go to the bathroom and getting hungry, so I let them out - on the proviso that they kept talking to one another.

I hope you enjoy reading Can't Get Enough as much as I enjoyed writing it, and I'd love to hear from you on: sarahjmayberry@hotmail.com"