Welcome to Michelle Holman’s Site

Michelle Holman is an author living in Cambridge, New Zealand who writes Romantic Comedies with a distinctly New Zealand flavour. Her books have been bestsellers and the movie rights for her first book, Bonkers  have been optioned. She’s published by HarperCollins in New Zealand and Australia, and Droemer Knaur in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.  

Michelle writes what she likes to read:- romances with strong men and women that are guaranteed to put a smile on her reader’s faces and always have a happy ending. She thinks we’re bombarded with enough of the sad stuff in the paper and on the news and doesn’t see why she should add to it. That doesn’t mean everything is plain sailing for her heros and heroines or that they don’t hit tricky situations, they do, and watching them dig themselves out of the mess they’ve unwittingly landed in is when the fun starts. According to Michelle’s husband, it isn’t so surprising that her characters frequently descend into mayhem because Michelle frequently does the same thing on the way between one of her “light bulb” moments -“I’ve just thought of a great idea for a story!” – to actually finishing the book. She’s researched Dairy Farming (how are cows artificially inseminated – turkey baster?) and the telephone sex industry (dominatrix sex – is it possible over the phone?), as well as serious issues like dyslexia and breast cancer.

One of her proudest moments happened in the frozen food section of a supermarket when a man asked her if she was that writer, Michelle Holman and when she said yes, complained that his wife hadn’t cooked dinner all weekend because she’d been reading one of Michelle’s books. The memory still brings a tear to Michelle’s eye and she hopes to be responsible for the rumbling of men’s stomachs for many years to come.

Michelle says:

I was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and lived next door to Titirangi Golf Course, which makes me a bonda fide ‘Westie’. Our house had the (then) standard kiwi quarter-acre section, and my brother and sisters and I treated the golf course like an extension of our back garden. My first attempt at writing was a romance about Elton John and a kiwi girl after I saw Elton at Western Springs during the Yellow Brick Road tour when I was thirteen. Hearing ‘Funeral For A Friend’ and ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ still gives me goosebumps.

My big OE (‘Overseas Experience’ for non-Downunder folk) beckoned when I was seventeen. I’ve since realized how brave my parents were to let me go. In England, on a blind date arranged by my cousin, I met my future husband, Les. It was a double date; I didn’t know his friend or the other girl. One of the rubber soles came off my wooden high heels which meant I sounded like I had a wooden leg. I decided to limp instead, it was better than going clunk! click! clunk! click! We went to a nightclub in Leicester Square. On our second date, we went to the greyhound racing in Romford with Les’ brother-in-law and twelve-year-old nephew. Yes, I know, dead romantic … but he was tall, cute and made me laugh. My husband tells people that my parents paid for a one-way flight for me, but that’s a scurrilous lie — they left money with relatives in the UK for my return. I just didn’t know about it. Or who had the money. In between travelling and scungy jobs, I did my nurse training, and Les went into the London Fire Brigade and started reading a lot. He didn’t have a lot of choice about the reading, because I always had my nose stuck in a book.

198444444!!!! No, actually it was1989 when I packed my bags and my Pom and returned to New Zealand. He did want to move Downunder; I didn’t kidnap him and force him onto the plane or anything. Our son and daughter were born, and while they were small I worked in the Emergency Department at the local hospital and, in between shifts, chicken pox and kindergarten, I began writing again while Les completed an MBA at Massey University and ran a business. It was a career change for him into the construction industry that prompted our move to the Waikato in 2003, and we’ve lived in the beautiful town of Cambridge ever since, along with a couple of horses, some cows, a mad cat and a deaf, bandy-legged black labrador. I began doing project management for community youth health projects in 2004.

New Year’s Resolutions. I don’t do them, apart from the one I made on New Years’s Eve 2005 to FINISH A BOOK AND SEND IT TO A PUBLISHER. I had six unfinished novels; every time I came across one, I felt guilty and shoved it to the back of the shelf. I kept on day-dreaming about being a writer and imagining what it’d be like to be published. I trawled publisher’s websites reading submission guidelines and learned that you make a submission only if you’ve completed the manuscript — more about that later. One night I dreamed about two women involved in a car accident arriving in heaven and a trainee angel deciding to send one of them back, but into the wrong body. During 2006, I wrote almost every night after work and most weekends, and in October I sent a query letter and the first three chapters of Bonkers to HarperCollins in Auckland. Sending the letter to HarperCollins was a major achievement for me and I was feeling quietly satisfied. I honestly expected a six-week wait followed by a rejection letter; I was just pleased that I’d finally climbed over the wall I always hit three-quarters of the way through a book. I knew how Bonkers ended; I just hadn’t transferred the last three or four chapters from my head to my computer.

A week later my husband walked into the kitchen holding a letter addressed to the pen name I’d used for my submission (I used a lot of those in the early days; Michelle Holman is my maiden name). HarperCollins wanted to see the rest of the book. Les and the kids shoved me into my office and I spent every spare moment there, surviving on chocolate biscuits supplied by my daughter, tea/coffee by my son, and meals by Les, until I completed Bonkers at 5 am the following Thursday. The Christmas/New Year break meant that I didn’t hear from Lorain Day, the Publishing Manager at HarperCollins, until early February 2007, but I remember the conversation very clearly.

Lorain: Hello? Michelle?

Me: Yes?

Lorain: Yes.

It was magic. I swear the screams of jubilation shot straight up the Waikato Expressway to Auckland and did a lap of honour around the Sky Tower. Bonkers hit the shelves on 1 December 2007, and for a while I turned into a bookshop stalker before Les banned me from going into bookshops until I could control myself. But that’s another story …

Several years and books later it’s still magic. And I’m still the woman picking peas out of the freezer at the supermarket.

I love hearing from the people who read my books, so drop me a line.