I was born and raised in Los Angeles,
California, a rare native for many years. I graduated from UCLA,
and worked in the LA County secondary school system, teaching junior
high school science, until we moved to Florida.
I can't remember learning to read,
only that I always did. My parents tell people they had to move
from our first home because I finished the library. Learning to
write is another story. In some ways, I've always been a writer—I
just never put the words on paper. Most of my ideas were based on
books or television shows or movies I thought I could "improve" with my
own plot or character changes. But my 'real' writing was usually
more technical. I wrote curriculum or training manuals.
I discovered fan fiction, which was a
great training ground once I decided I could handle all the boring
typing mechanics. Writing dialogue with all those commas and
quotation marks in the right places was a major headache—too much
work. I could enjoy my stories in my head and not have to do all
that technical stuff.
But, one weekend, when I was home
alone, I decided to try to rework a story that had been rattling around
in my head for years. It had started as a vague MacGyver story,
but turned into a Highlander one, because that was what I was reading
at the time. I sent it to someone whose work I'd been editing,
and she gently guided me through fixing my hack mistakes.
The gauntlet had been thrown.
There were 'rules' I had to learn, and since I had no more wall space
for needlepoint, writing became a challenge and a new creative
outlet. My stories were well-received in the Highlander fandom
world, but I wanted to try writing original characters.
I discovered a writing group at
iVillage, but found the short story format very hard to master.
I'd write a beginning, a middle, and more and more middle, so I moved
to novels where I could develop the characters in more depth and
finally get to a satisfying 'the end.'
Ironically, my first publications were
short stories, with no mystery whatsoever, available at
The Wild Rose Press.
An avid mystery reader, I thought I'd
try writing a mystery, but as my daughters pointed out, it was more of
a romance. (Mom, she noticed his brown eyes were flecked with
hazel on page 10. It's a romance!) I realized that even when
reading a mystery, I was captivated by the relationships between the
characters – Faye Kellerman's Rina and Peter, Barbara Parker's Gail and
Anthony, even Laurie R. King's Mary and Sherlock. Even in books
without continuing relationships, I was still watching characters hook
up more than paying attention to the crime—on the first read. Of
course, this means I read almost every book twice; once for the
relationship, once for the mystery.
I joined RWA and its Central Florida chapter, to learn
about the other side of writing—the business side as I move to the next
step: getting my work off my hard drive and out where others can
see it.
I now have four romantic suspense novels
published with
Cerridwen Press, and one due out in December, 2008, from Five Star
Expressions