About​

Raised in the 1960s, I knew a lot about drugs, turning in and dropping out in my preteens and teenage years. Unfortunately, I hated what happened to me while high, and didn’t fit in with my mother’s cool people. Felt foreign inside my home, school, or on the playground. So I developed a fantasy life and played in nature, the Tujunga Canyon Wash only three blocks from my street.

There, I found solace in playing with lizards, horned toads, water snakes, and my imaginary friends.

I longed to be accepted by the clean cut kids, police officers, and doctors. (Opposite of my upbringing.) My shyness and unkept appearance blocked the ease in making friends, so I wrote poetry and stories alone. At college, I won a camera and a financial gift, so I played in images.

My first novel, What Feeds the Heart, started over twenty years ago. Soon issued a love/hate relationship with the manuscript until I joined a few writing groups. I learned sophisticated plot developments and character arcs. After graduating with my Master’s degree, I married a clean cut man from Illinois, and we’re happy 30 years later.

Since fourteen, I’ve seen one therapist after another, in hopes to heal the insecure, fearful inner child within me. Joining an anonymous program, I am learning to reparent myself with “gentleness, love and respect.”

I’ve also completed three other full manuscripts: Alonia from Ganymede (dystopian Young Adult Science Fiction), True to the Union (Magical Realism-Time shifting to 1862 Civil War centering on the Vater side of my ancestors), and Across the Line (continuation of the character Amber from What Feeds the Heart).