I’m not sure to where to start to tell you about me. I think I’ll go back to my childhood. I lived in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina for the first 10 years of my life and my love of books and reading were instilled in me when I was a little girl. My mother read everything from Shakespeare to Grace Livingston Hill and my father was a devoted western fan. I remember some of the most exciting days of my childhood were the Thursdays the Bookmobile came to the small rural community where I lived.
In the third grade my teacher, Miss Lucy Coles read a chapter book to the class entitled Cowgirl Kate by Enid Johnson. It came out in 1950 and was a best selling young adult novel. I was enthralled with the story and the writing. I went home from school and told my mother and grandmother that I was going to write a book. And I did. It was a re-write of Beauty and the Beast and it was 3 pages long. Of course, it never hit the best seller list, but it was my beginning.
Then life intervened. I got married, had a daughter, went through a divorce and worked at various jobs. Through the years, my day work has varied from a clerk in a department store to a Human Resource Manager for a large manufacturing company. I always thought of these as jobs to pay the bills and knew writing was my real career.
More years ago than I want to admit, I began writing and selling short stories and articles to magazines and newspapers. In the meantime, I wrote a book. Then another. And another. It wasn’t until 1999 when my mother developed cancer and I took a leave from my job to tend her that I wrote my first published novel, Jilted by Death. Since then I’ve had 4 more novels and 4 non-fiction books published.
Of course I’m an avid reader. I also love to travel, play board and electronic games with my grandchildren, walk on the beach, try new foods and go to the movies. (Of course, with two grandchildren, I don’t see many grown-up movies. But I can tell you all about Tangled, Toy Story, etc. which I saw with my granddaughter and Harry Potter, and the superhero films I saw with my grandson.)