About Me

Mostly I save lives by day (I am a physiotherapist in a sole charge clinic and frequently hear ” You gotta help me with this pain – it’s just killin’ me!” – when I do, they seem to live through it) and I tell lies (I am a fiction writer) by night.

My debut novel, Quintspinner – A Pirate’s Quest came about as the result of a Google search gone wrong. I was searching some medical condition, and up in the search results came “Women Pirates”.  Huh? thought I. I didn’t even know that there were such things and it niggled at me for several hours, so I went back and read about them. Turns out, not only were there such  beauties, ( well, “beauty” is all in the the of the beholder) but there were many of them, throughout the ages, and the lives of several of them have been very well documented.

Two of the most famous were Mary Read and Anne Bonny, whose real lives were much stranger than fiction. Thinking that I could/should/would write about them, I sadly discovered that many before me already had, and that those authors were much better writers than I. However, in reading about life in the 1700’s, I became fascinated with all of the nitty gritty down-and-dirty details of life in the 1700’s. ( They re-used dead people’s teeth to make dentures for the toothless live ones.)

So I researched.

For hours.

Days.

Kept notebooks full of details. Dreamed about the details (doesn’t every popular series *cough* – um… Twilight – get birthed with an author’s dream?). And eventually wrote. And my own characters came to life.

I’m a bit like a bird, in that every sparkly thing gets my attention, so I  am easily distracted and have a list of favorite things to do that is as long as the day of summer solstice. Most often this lists interferes with my writing intentions and includes playing piano, learning the fiddle, playing the djembe ( African drum), oil painting, landscaping, including stone masonry (see my stone staircase and patio just below), renovating old houses ( can drywall and shingle with the best of ’em), participating in live theater ( acting , director, set construction, stage manager), and most recently learned to dance stand on pointe in real honest-to-goodness pointe shoes. Totally scatter-brained, I know.

But a good deal of my waking free time is spent writing.In my head, on napkins in restaurants, in notebooks, and eventually on my computer. It’s a good life.

So I’m honored to have you meeting me here. I hope I can keep you entertained.