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Third Eye. What happened might strain credulity even in the context of a Rosemary Rogers novel. Working only at night for more than a year, she rewrote one of her childhood tales 24 times, then mailed it to Avon. Today the author lives quietly in a small dramatic villa perched on a crag above the Pacific near Carmel. Her three oldest children are now away from home. "I'd like to live with a man," she admits, "but I find men in real life don't come up to my fantasies. I want culture, spirit and sex all rolled up together."
Rosemary sleeps all day. But "when the sun goes down, I come alive," she says. In late afternoon she slips into jeans and meditates. "I've done yoga for years. It got me through the worst times. I can activate the third eye now and feel the light above my head. Meditation gives me the feeling of being part of the universe." At suppertime she sits down to breakfast, and about 8 p.m., with the roar of the sea and the light of the moon streaming through the windows, she flicks on the stereo system and plays mood music to arouse her fantasies —Mozart for a scene at court, flamenco for a seduction or a rape. When the fantasies are flowing, she begins to type at stuttering speed, scarcely stopping until eight in the morning.
"My books come to me in mind movies," she explains. "I see the action in Technicolor on a wide screen in my head, and I hear the characters speak every line of dialogue before I write it. All my heroes look like Clint Eastwood —I've had this absurd crush on him for years." Her heroines she imagines as Jacqueline Bisset or Olivia Newton-John. "I just write what comes to me. Sometimes I turn a passage in to Avon without rereading it. I'm just now learning to rewrite competently. But I could never do things to please critics or an intellectual coterie. I write to please ordinary people—I write the kinds of books I want to read. Sometimes I go back and read one of my own books, and you know, I really like them. Wow, I say, that's good!"