It’s the birthday of Nora Roberts (b. 1950), bestselling author of more than 225 romance novels, which (I’m just going to say this) seems like plenty. Roberts is so prolific that she publishes romantic suspense novels and science fiction police procedurals under the pseudonym J.D. Robb to help stave off public suspicion of anyone who is that prolific.

A nature analogy to help you wrap your brain around just how prolific Roberts is: she’s somewhere between a Norway lemming, which has a max of 192 babies in its lifetime, and a European rabbit, which has a max of 360. On the other end of the spectrum, we have Harper Lee, who is less prolific than an orangutan, who has a modest three babies, but then who cares because To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the greatest novels of all time.

(Lest you think I’m disrespecting Roberts, let me point out that The New Yorker wrote an article called “Real Romance: How Nora Roberts became America’s most popular novelist” and notes that “Roberts is good at what she does not only because she is prolific but also because she can write zingy dialogue and portray scrappy but sincere characters.”)

Roberts was born in Silver Spring, Maryland, the youngest of five and the only girl in an Irish Catholic family. She married young and stayed home to raise her two sons, trying everything from macramé to bread baking in search of a creative outlet. Roberts finally started writing in the winter of 1979 when she and the children were housebound during a blizzard “with a dwindling supply of chocolate.” (Respect. How anyone gets anything done with a three year old OR a six year old in the house, let alone both, is beyond me.) Her first novel, Irish Thoroughbred, came out two years later.

Roberts and her first husband divorced in 1983, and later that year she met her second husband when she hired him to build some bookshelves; he made her spaghetti for their first date. They married in 1985. Roberts writes eight hours a day, finishes a book in about 45 days, and publishes five books a year. She is smart-mouthed, kind but not “huggy” kind, and self-taught. Her most recent novel is Vendetta in Death (written as J.D. Robb), from the In Death series featuring Lieutenant Eve Dallas and her husband—but don’t blink, there are several more books on their way.

Have a reasonably prolific Thursday—the giant panda can have seven babies in its lifetime—and stay scrupulously honest to the data.