After dieting & starving from the time she was 11 years old until she was 33, Pat Ballard decided she was going to stop her self-destruction. She determined to eat healthily, exercise moderately, and accept the body that followed. “I vowed to never again stand in front of a mirror and point out the bad things I saw, but to find and concentrate on the good things looking back at me,” she says now.
As her self-acceptance grew, Pat realized she was far from alone in her previous body hatred. So many women—women of all sizes—aren’t happy with who they are. She also became increasingly aware of the lack of positive plus-size role models in the media, and set about to write motivational romance novels featuring Big Beautiful Heroines, donning the crown of Queen of Rubenesque Romances.
“But these books aren’t just for larger women,” Pat says. “They’re for women of all sizes to learn to accept themselves for the wonderful one-of-a-kind work of art they are, and stop trying to look like or be someone that they were never genetically programmed to be.”
Her fan base continues to grow, with readers regularly commenting on her books’ fresh attitude of self-acceptance and recognition of the natural diversity of body sizes.
“Thank God, someone has the strength to be sane, and let a woman ‘just be,’” one fan wrote Pat. “Someone can look the societal ideal in the eye and say ‘no thanks, I’m valuable as I am.’ Women are tired and overstressed from doing it all. The lengths we go to in order to ‘fit the ideal body image’ are undervalued. We need a collective ‘enough already,’ and to send out the message that who we are as individuals is worth enough. Thanks.”
Ava Manning has allowed her heart to be broken once. Once is enough. She never intends to let anyone get close enough to hurt her again. She just wants to do her job as a lab technician at Cloneall Drugs, Inc. without any complications in her life. But after Ava saw some research she wasn't supposed to see, someone wants her dead. And now she has to deal with the Southern talking, g-dropping, charming LAPD detective Ricky Don McKinzie.
Her life is just beginning to get complicated.
