When Joya Fields was a senior at the University of Maryland, she interned for Easter Seals and met many people with disabilities. It was an eye-opening experience that the book-loving English major drew on years later for her first novel, Beneath the Surface, which released this month from The Wild Rose Press.

“The heroine, Brooke, is a below-the-knee amputee. I wanted her to fight injustice to find inner strength. Since this is a romance, of course I wanted her to fall in love, too.”

In Beneath the Surface, Brooke is an underwater archaeologist who loses part of her leg – and her parents – in a devastating earthquake. She travels to Florida to be fitted for a state-of-the-art prosthesis, but the trip turns traumatic when a fun scuba-diving expedition ends in a fiery explosion. The usually independent heroine finds herself entangled with two men: one a cunning villain determined to protect a secret in the sea, and one an overprotective police detective who’s creating a different kind of sparks for Brooke.

“Romantic suspense is a tricky, but satisfying, genre to write, because you constantly balance two story arcs – the emotional development between the hero and heroine, and the growing threat of the suspense,” says Joya’s editor at The Editorial Department, Beth Jusino. “Joya manages to achieve both with her strong dialogue and appealing characters.”

Joya’s leap into writing novel-length fiction came after she published more than 100 short stories and articles. She wrote the first draft of Beneath the Surface quickly, in less than a month. But getting from first draft to published book took many more months and many more drafts. Joya sought feedback from others right away, giving an early draft to her critique group. Their comments helped her to dig deeper into her story and characters, and she re-wrote and submitted a query to an editor in New York.

That editor requested a full manuscript, but eventually passed on the story. “He gave me some good ideas, so I revised again. Then I posted the revised draft to my on-line critique partner and she went through the entire book, line-by-line. After I made those changes, I submitted to The Wild Rose Press.”

The editor at Wild Rose liked Joya’s manuscript, but sent her what writers call a “revise and resubmit” memo with specific changes the editor wanted to see before she could offer a contract. “It was time for a professional opinion, and that’s when I contacted The Editorial Department and got lucky enough to retain Beth Jusino’s excellent services.”

After a round of annotation with Beth, Joya felt ready to submit again to The Wild Rose Press, and this time she got “the call.”

“The acceptance email from the editor was a lot of fun. The day I received the book cover was awesome, too, because the artist did a great job. [But] I think the most satisfying part about publishing the book is that readers will hopefully relate to a character who has a disability and maybe learn some new things about people who are amputees…. And it would be a very high compliment if a reader contacted me to tell me they had a bad day, opened my book, and then forgot their own stress because they got to live vicariously through Brooke and Garrett.”

Joya’s currently involved in marketing her new release. She created a book trailer video to share on YouTube, blogs regularly, and will be featured on a blog tour of at least fifteen different sites. She’s also working on a new series of romantic suspense novels, this time with a paranormal angle and a haunted Baltimore apartment building. Beneath the Surface is just the beginning.

Find out more and follow Joya Fields:

Website: http://joyafields.com/

Blog: http://joyafieldswriting.blogspot.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/JoyaFields