As I’ve grown older, so have my heroines.  When I first started writing I was a young mother with children.  So were my protagonists.  I got my Masters in counseling and my stories were about parents with worrisome children.  My own children grew up and I had time to work on longer projects.

The setting of my first novel is an elementary school, my characters include the divorcing messed-up school counselor and five of her most messed-up kids. Write about what you know became my mantra.

The second novel tells about a slacker young man, an ex-hockey player, whose dead mother continues to advise him from the stories she left him on her iMac.  I’m not dead yet, but I do have an ice-skating son.

Four old college friends meet at a beach cabin to gossip, laugh, drink wine, and compare upper arm flab in the next book, not suspecting their lives will be radically changed by the time the weekend was over.  Three of the women give me permission to publish their stories.  Mine is the fourth. 

My son, the hockey player, advised me to put a little blood and gore in my next book if I expected to get published.  He is a Clive Cussler fan.  I followed his advice.  The result is a thriller about an old lady who removes graffiti from local mail boxes and a black-eyed goth girl who, despite their dissimilar ages and life styles, manage to stand up to and defeat a serial killer. I don’t know a serial killer, personally, but I go out with Graffiti X and clean up mailboxes. Write about what you know, at least part of the time.

Over the years I’ve moved from being a naïve young woman writing poetry late at night to a mother with little time to write anything except notes to teachers, to an educator whose days were filled with other people’s stories and nights with my clicking typewriter. Now I’m a retired woman rich with time and the ambition to examine her life and the people in it.  My writing may read like fiction but it springs from truth.