Here's something most people don't know about me. Long before I wrote my first romance novel, I wanted to dig up dinosaurs for a living.
I've been enthralled by dinosaurs for as long as I can remember. So when I left school, that was the plan. Paleontology. Bones, red dirt, discoveries, the lot.
Unfortunately, I was made to study accounting instead. Boring!!!
I'll admit the accounting has come in handy over the years, running an author business. But at seventeen, sitting in a classroom learning about balance sheets with dinosaurs still stomping around my head, it felt like a prison sentence.
Then came Jurassic Park
I was 24 when Jurassic Park came out, and we'd never seen anything like it. Those dinosaurs were soooo real.
My hubby worked for Panasonic at the time, and thanks to a Panasonic promotion we scored tickets to the red carpet opening at Movie World on the Gold Coast. Talk about a night. I still have the mug and T-shirt they gave us. Dino groupie, LOL.
I remember being terrified out of my mind when that giant dinosaur was sniffing around the car those two kids were trapped in. And that noise when the T-Rex roared. Bloody hell, talk about chills.
But my favorite scene was the stampede. All those dinosaurs came thundering through the tall grass, and there's Dr Alan Grant, crouched down behind a fallen log, calm as anything, actually enjoying it. Meanwhile I would've been screaming, "Oh my freaking god, get me the hell out of hereeeee!!!"
A few years ago I went to Hawaii with a couple of author friends, and we visited Jurassic Valley at Kualoa Ranch on Oahu. The Ka'a'awa Valley is where they filmed the stampede scene in Jurassic Park. One of my favorite scenes. The fallen log that Grant and the kids shelter under is still sitting there.
I was like a kid at a theme park. 
I never became a paleontologist. So I wrote one instead.
Meet Charlie Macintyre. Fiercely independent, brilliant at her job, and pretty much everything seventeen-year-old me wanted to be.
In Outback Secrets, Charlie comes to Koolaroo Ranch chasing a career-defining dinosaur discovery and collides head-on with a brooding cowboy determined to kick her off his land. Then a flash flood traps them in a maze of hidden caves, and survival takes a deadly turn. Buried down there in the dark, they uncover evidence of a decades-old murder, and Charlie realizes the land is hiding far more than fossils.
I set Koolaroo about 200 kilometers from Winton in western Queensland, and that was no accident. Winton is Australia's dinosaur capital. It's home to the Australian Age of Dinosaurs, which holds the largest collection of Australian dinosaur fossils in the world, dug straight out of the ground around it. Yeehaa!
Outback Secrets is book one in my Koolaroo Ranch series, and it's free in Kindle Unlimited.
So even though I never became a paleontologist, I got to be one through my amazing character Charlie. YAY.