Kiama author Karen Deen was at a superannuation conference, staring out the window at boats on Sydney Harbour, when she came up with the idea for her first novel.

It was 2017 and the now world-renowned romance writer was not yet a novelist. She was a partner in a successful Jamberoo accounting firm who always had a book on her bedside table but never dreamed of being a writer.

“I was a good reader but I never wanted to be an author,” says Karen, who last month released her 16 th novel The Attraction. “I left school and went straight into accounting”.

So what changed? Like many women walking the wobbly tightrope of family and work commitments, Karen suffered from “working-mum guilt” and tried to do everything for everyone except herself.

“As a full-time working parent, I was juggling being a partner in a business, with raising kids, running a household, caring for my mum who was sick and volunteering for local sporting teams,” she recalls.

“I had run myself into the ground and I was physically and mentally exhausted. It felt like everybody wanted a piece of me and I had no pieces left to give.

"I was doing everything for everyone else but needed to do something for myself.

“So, when I was at that conference in Sydney, staring at the luxury yachts on the harbour, I started sketching out a plot for a novel.”

Once Karen began plotting and jotting she couldn’t stop, and the accountant of 32 years found herself writing a book.

“It all just came flooding out,” she laughs. “I scribbled it all down in my accountant’s notebook and in a few days I had written 10,000 words in pencil on paper.

"I had to buy myself a laptop so I could type it all down, that nearly killed me!”

Once she had written 40,000 words, Karen told her husband she was going to “write that book I’ve been talking about for a while” and asked three girlfriends to read what she had written and “tell me honestly if it’s crap”.

“They loved it and couldn’t wait to see what happened next, and my family was so supportive,” says Karen.

That book was Loves Wall - the first in a five-book series - and she would get up at 6am, go to work as an accountant, come home take care of her family and write until 2am.

While Karen loved her career in finance it was writing that “enthralled” her and she spent every spare moment “creating a world that would take me, and my readers, out of the everyday”.

“Books are an escape from the daily grind and that’s one of the things I love most about reading, but when you’re writing a book you also get to choose where the story goes and that is such a privilege and so exciting,” she says.

“And the research is so much fun, all my books are set overseas so I do a lot of googling to build those worlds and create that character development.”

Karen routinely writes 5000 words a day and churns out as many as four books each year now that she is a full-time novelist. She has written three series – The Time for Love, The Chicago Boys and the Hotel Temptation series which includes her latest release The Attraction.

She has also kept the scrawled first draft she wrote in pencil many moons ago as a reminder of when “her two worlds collided” and she eventually resigned as a partner in her accounting firm.

It was a “big leap of faith,” but the decision was made easier when COVID decimated the finance world in 2020.

“I was fielding calls at all hours of the day and night from panicked clients who had to stand staff down,” she says.

“We became their counsellors; it was emotionally taxing for everyone and that’s when I decided life’s too short.

"I was working and writing around the clock, and it wasn’t sustainable. I thought ‘if I don’t do this know I never will’.”

Karen was also caring for her beloved mum, who had cancer and was in palliative care.

“I didn’t tell mum I was writing my first book until I’d completely finished it,” she explains.

“Then a few years later when we knew we were going to lose her, I wanted her to know I was going to be a full-time author.”

Next month Karen will travel to the UK for a book signing of The Attraction, attended by thousands of romance fans.

The novel is a contemporary romance set in London and centres around a workplace relationship between a financial controller for a top hotel chain and the second-in charge of a rival company.

“Writing about a billionaire’s romance in the corporate world draws on the world I lived in when I worked in finance,” explains Karen. “Every author draws on parts of themselves and the things they know without meaning to.”

She says becoming a full-time writer is “one of the best decisions” she’s ever made but locals still sometimes “look at me like I’ve got two heads when I tell them I’m a romance writer”.

And while a coastal love story set in Kiama is not on the cards, Karen hasn’t ruled out a small-town rural romance set somewhere in Australia.

Copies of her novels are available on Amazon and her website.