Heather Maclean believes in love at first sight--with good reason. She met her dashing Scottish husband at Walt Disney World on Spring Break in college (he was a bartender at the Rose & Crown pub), told her friends she was going to marry him, and they eloped 3 months later.
A year later, they celebrated with a proper Disney wedding: one of the very first (so many things were messed up, but it was practically free!). There was not a shotgun in sight, and they've been blissfully wed for 22 years. And counting.
Heather grew up a wild child in the woods of Missouri as the oldest of 8 children. She graduated from Princeton University during which time she was obsessed with appearing on gameshows. She got her wish on "The Price is Right," was a finalist for "The Real World: San Francisco," and went on to star in the pilot episode of MTV's "Road Rules." She had hoped to keep her appearance on the sordid FOX dating show STUDS a secret from her mother, but a wily reporter from "Entertainment Weekly" was at the studio the same day and took Heather's photo. When she appeared--in ugly photos dressed like trash--in a 6-page spread in the magazine, her cover was blown. Determined to make lemonade, Heather wrote a letter to the Editor-in-Chief and demanded a job for her "pain and social life suffering." She got it, and worked happily at EW for 2 years.
After graduation, Heather moved to LA to work the The Walt Disney Company. She built Disneyland's first, award-winning website, and moved to the Studio Lot in Burbank to code the company's first intranet, Team Disney. It was at Disney that Heather discovered her love of ghostwriting and the new TV genre of reality programming. Heather was the first person to ever answer Mickey Mouse's email (his fingers were too big to type), and was cast in the FOX reality competition show "The Rebel Billionaire." In 2004, she traveled 50,000 miles around the world with Sir Richard Branson of Virgin, alternately helping improve the lives of others (designing sustainable development initiatives in South African villages) and fearing for her own (rappelling out of a Black helicopter in a Moroccan sandstorm, almost drowning in the crocodile-infested Zambezi river, plummeting like a lunatic 300 feet over Victoria Falls...). She was also the first civilian mom to experience zero gravity aboard the "space plane," an experience she will never, ever repeat. Here's a link with some of the highlights if you'd like to laugh at her: bit.ly/108TJ9s.
After her brush with fame and PTSD, Heather launched a career helping other reality stars launch theirs. She wrote and edited 14 nonfiction books for reality stars including Housewives Lisa Vanderpump and Teresa Guidice. Toward a Secret Sky is Heather's first YA novel, and her true passion. She currently lives in the woods of Michigan with her 3 children (18, 16, and 11), and her Scottish prince.
www.heather-maclean.com