“I want to have someone stay up all night reading because he or she can't put down one of my books. I want someone to fall in love with my characters, to root for their happy ending. I want someone to lose themselves in a world I created, and never want to leave. I want someone to realize from reading my books that maybe they can have their own happily-ever-after, that the concepts of love and romance are not obsolete in our world.”
Richard McClellan is a romance writer. He writes clean contemporary romances, currently favoring Second Chance Romances. It has become a passion of his.
Richard is hardly the stereotypical romance writer. First, he’s a seventy-something married man, making him a baby boomer, far from the normal image of a romance writer. Further distancing him from that image is his background. He has a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, has been a licensed Professional Engineer, and a Certified Quality Engineer.
So—why romance writing? That’s a question he’s still trying to figure out. He offered a clue in the dedication to his first book, Return to Rainbow Ridge: “I want to thank those girls with whom I struggled to define love when I was a young, very smart but oh so ignorant teen-aged boy. They are not and will not be in my stories, but they are the reason I began writing them.
It’s supremely satisfying to him to provide the happily-ever-afters for his characters. Early in his writing efforts, he thought he wanted to write thrillers, but somewhere along the way he had a story idea featuring a romance between his two main characters, and somewhere inside him, a light flashed on. The rest, as they say, is history.
His first novel, a Second Chance Romance titled Return to Rainbow Ridge, won First Place in the Adult Book category in the Oklahoma City Writers Inc. 2018 Writing Contest. as well as the Oklahoma Romance Writer’s Guild 2020 Heart Award for Sensual Romance.
His fourth novel, Latent Hearts, last in the Second Chance Series and to be published sometime later in 2023, has already won Second Place in the Adult Book category in the Oklahoma City Writers Inc. 2022 Writing Contest.
He’s a very analytical type, with a need to get the details right. This serves him well in his writing, leading him to research the smallest things to make his stories realistic. But there’s a creative side to him as well, which is responsible for the story ideas that keep popping up in his head, dozens more at this point than he’ll probably ever have time to make into novels.
Although writing takes up much of his time, he also finds time for his family, including his wife, Nancy, two grown children scattered around the world, three grown stepchildren living locally, and among them all nine grandchildren—eight girls and one boy. He and his wife live in a suburb of Oklahoma City and are dedicated to their church, where both are ordained Elders and Richard is the Treasurer. He even provides substitute preaching services from time to time.
His only regret about starting his writing career so late is having the time to write all the stories he wants to do. He has ideas for more than forty romances, so we’ll see how many get to see the light of day. He prays, “I’m ready for you, God; just let me finish these stories you’ve put in my head.”