I grew up in a devastated, post-war Britain where everything was still rationed. Bombed buildings, including the elementary school I attended abounded and power cuts were almost daily occurrences.  It sounds bleak but I have the fondest memories of my old neighborhood in Splott, Cardiff and visit it whenever I travel to the United Kingdom, even though a lot of the old neighborhood is now gone.

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In my half a school—the top storey was still missing when we moved to Bournemouth in 1953, but has since been rebuilt--my favorite subjects were reading and writing.  When I was seven I wrote an essay entitled, "A Walk With My Dog" for which the headmistress awarded me a half-crown (in old money), a fortune then.  Well, probably the equivalent of five dollars today—but it was a fortune to me.  I wrote another essay for the entry exam to grammar school, "My Favorite Holiday", the subject being skiing in the Swiss Alps.  Since I didn’t have a dog and had no idea of what skiing entailed, it was inevitable that I should grow up to write fiction, with a few detours along the way.

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The detours included drama school, a few years of weekly rep, emigration to the US, marriage, children and, thankfully, divorce, until I finally settled in the mountains of beautiful North Carolina. I had continued with my writing, taking classes, working on short stories, a few of which were published in magazines that no longer exist—not my fault, folks--but I shied away from writing a book. It was when I received an overwhelming response to a remark I had made in a staff publication, talking about my post-divorce life, in which I said, “I’ll take a cat over a husband any day”, a statement by which I still stand, that I realized that many women shared my sentiment and the result is my first book, "Almost Abducted".

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I still have Monte, my remaining cat.  He helps me a lot with editing by walking on my keyboard and deleting the pages he feels are not up to his exacting standards, but I wouldn’t be without him and who knows, he could be right.

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I love libraries and have to ration the number of books I check out because if it’s a choice between reading my favorite author or staring at my computer screen guess which one wins? Theater is another passion, one I don’t indulge nearly enough but as long as I have family, friends, and wine, life is good.