D.L. Hess

D.L. Hess, also known as Dorian Hess, grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in a loving household with her younger sister. From a young age, she was exposed to travel, art, music, literature, and theater by her mother and the women in her family. Her father exposed her to outdoor activities like soccer and fishing.

When she wasn’t at school, participating in extra-curricular activities, playing competitive soccer, etc., Dorian was creating stories in her head, using her sister’s Barbies as place-holders for her characters. At her all-girls high school, she discovered a love for poetry, and she became a published poet at eighteen. She went to Louisiana State University on full scholarship and bounced around majors until finally landing on and completing separate degrees in English (Creative Writing) and Anthropology.

After college, Dorian stayed at LSU for graduate courses in Anthropology, but she took one Introduction to Screenwriting class on a whim. By the end of the semester, she was applying to leave LSU for other Anthropology graduate programs… and film school in Los Angeles. The day after she received her acceptance to her top Anthropology choice, she received her acceptance to the University of Southern California, the number one film school in the world. There was no question for Dorian — she was moving to L.A.

Dorian learned a lot about writing, characters, dialogue, and plot in those two years at USC. There were many sleepless nights and gray hairs, but Dorian came out of the program at the top of her class, with her television series (her thesis) After the Fall receiving highest distinction. That project catapulted Dorian into a whirlwind of meetings and opportunities that she still benefits from today. A year later, for example, she became a staff writer on NBC’s Siberia.

After Siberia, however, Dorian’s career slowed down and she went back to scrambling for jobs in the middle of a recession in hard-hit Hollywood. She wrote when she could, but nothing ever landed. It finally got to be too much and she was at the end of her rope, praying for an answer, when her fairy godmothers came calling. Four years earlier, during that post-USC whirlwind, Dorian had a — what she considered mildly unsuccessful — meeting with a young European producer. That producer remembered Dorian and asked if she would be interested in throwing her hat into the ring of adapting the Berlin Gothic book series into a television series. A forty-page proposal and multiple interviews later, Dorian had the gig.

Then, two days after the producer first got in touch with Dorian, Dorian’s best friend from USC (who hadn’t spoken to one another in years), popped up and asked Dorian if she still liked romance novels and would she be interested in being a ghostwriter? Work is work, and even though Dorian had never written anything in prose longer than a short story (and that was painful and difficult), she said she would be interested in trying. So after another writing sample (this time of a graphic sex scene) and an interview, with no experience in novel-writing to speak of, Dorian became a professional ghostwriter. It was on that project that she learned she did have a novel in her and that she could write in prose.

After that, there was no stopping her. Dorian has since worked for both godmothers multiple times over the years and has picked up work through their generous word-of-mouth. Then, it was finally time to write her own books, and that was how Sir came to be.

In her incredibly limited free time, Dorian can be found in front of the television with her dog Busby Berkeley, reading, traveling, woodworking, fly-tying, meditating, gardening, or being active in her local community. She’s very blessed that she’s traveled to approximately 30 countries on all 7 continents (including Antarctica), and she has a whole bucket list of travel destinations still to go, including cruising the world’s major rivers, of which she’s done the Mississippi and the Nile.