About Rina

I write love stories about people who are afraid of being known and the people patient enough to know them anyway.

The Tidewater Secrets is my series -- five interconnected romances set in Saltmere, Oregon, a fictional town on the coast where the forest meets the sea, the fog has opinions, and a dead postmistress left behind 243 undelivered love letters that change everything. The series begins with The Letter You Never Got, the story of a competent, cheerful contractor hiding a grief she won't name and a quiet fisherman who sees through her anyway.

Before I was a writer, I was a reader. I have been a reader for longer than I have been anything else. I grew up in libraries, in the back seats of cars with paperbacks, in the particular silence of a house where everyone is reading at the same time. I am always reading at least three books at once. I have accepted this about myself.

I write about love because I think love is the most complicated and interesting thing people do, and the least honest genre to write about it would be one that pretends it's simple. My characters have been hurt but they are not broken. They are wary, not bitter. They are people who have built walls for good reasons and who need someone specific -- not just anyone, but the right person -- to make staying inside those walls feel like a worse option than the terrifying business of letting someone in.

I live on the Oregon coast, where the rain is horizontal, the coffee is too strong, and the fog sits on the harbor in the morning like it's thinking about something. I write at a desk that faces a wall because if I could see the ocean I would never finish a sentence. I walk the headlands when I'm stuck on a plot problem and usually come home with a solution and wet shoes.

Rina Philips is a pen name. This is not a secret -- it's a preference. I like the idea that you imagine me however you want. I am probably shorter than you're picturing.