(Just) A Little About Me

I was born and raised in Northern California and have a family with long roots there. Like many writers, I always wanted to be a writer. In third grade, my best friend and I (and she is still my best friend all these years later) wrote enough stories that we opened our own lending library at school (gotta love Montessori education). I don’t remember any of those stories but I do remember that most of them had to do with horses because that was the other thing I was (just) a little obsessed with.

My mother read to me and my brother ALL THE TIME and made sure we always had books on hand. But when I was about twelve, my dad introduced me to the world of mysteries and spies and cops and killers and it was all over for me. Together, he and I went through everything from Ludlum to Parker to Christie and when I discovered Dick Francis, a writer who combined mysteries AND horses, well, let’s just say that was about as close to heaven on earth as I had ever found. (Tami Hoag does this occasionally and when she does, I think I finish her books in about a day.) We also had a steady stream of James Bond, The Thin Man and The Twilight Zone for movies and television. Needless to say, I was reared on a foundation of mysteries (with a few high concept books thrown thanks to an extremely literate mother, a traditional high school, and a minor in comparative literature in college) and it is still one of my favorite genres.

But when I turned 30-ish, we were headed out on a family vacation to Italy and with two kids under the age of four, I decided I needed something lighter than Virginia Woolf to read on the flight and I couldn’t find any mysteries that I hadn’t already read. So I picked up something I never had before, a romance novel. It was romantic suspense and just like when I discovered Dick Francis, when I finished the book, I felt like I had found my people. A mystery novel AND a happy ending – how could it get any better than that??? (By adding horses of course, but I’m working on that.)

When we returned from Italy, I became fixated on writing my own stories. I would huddle in the guest room for hours at night and write and write and write. To make a long story short, I did finish that first book and then another and then another. By the time I finally had the courage to let anything go out to the public, I submitted my first excerpt to the Pacific Northwest Writers Association annual contest and was selected as a finalist. It gave me confidence, which was good, because I wasn’t a finalist the next year or the next, but still, I kept writing.

And now here I am, an award winning author with seven published novels to my name. It’s been a great ride so far and here’s to many more years – and books – to come. Oh, and if you’re wondering about the specifics, I live in the Northern California in a house full of males including my husband, two (loud but awesome) sons, a cat and dog, and a gender neutral, but well stocked, wine rack. And I still love horses and ride any and every chance I get (I’m an eventer by background but with aspirations of becoming a dressage queen.)