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                                    Biography




I was born in Hamilton, Ontario. It's a city bound by Lake Ontario on one side; the Niagara Escarpment on the other.

When I was seven, we moved to the adjacent small town of Stoney Creek. As a kid, I spent my free time rambling around the woods just behind the Stoney Creek Monument. My friends and I would climb trees, ford creeks, run full tilt down the paths that cut through the ravine, and, best of all, scramble around on the rocks at The Devil's Punchbowl. How old were we? Nine, ten maybe? And our parents let us do this, unsupervised? I guess those were different times. Or perhaps we conveniently forgot to tell our parents exactly where we'd been all day. 

      When I was eight, I wrote my first book. It was a space opera, where two kids stow away on a Federation Academy Starship. I got stuck in the middle, and didn't finish it. I still get stuck in the middle of novels. Some things never change. 


      I went to University, studied Psychology, got married, landed my first job as a counselor at a community college.



      My husband and I lived in London, Oakville, Mississauga, Ottawa and Kenora--all in Ontario.
 

   Here's what we looked liked. We were NOT hippies! Honest.


   This was taken about six years ago, just after moving to Wisconsin.

      Before moving to Wisconsin, we spent ten years living out in the country near Kenora, Ontario. We enjoyed great friends and neighbors, a life on the water, moose wandering through our yard, bears upending my compost bin every spring, blueberries and wild strawberries and pin cherries and raspberries. And fish--lots and lots of fish. Also mosquitoes, black flies, mayflies, June bugs, army worms, carpenter ants, pine beetles, wood ticks, deer ticks...but hey, everything's got to live, right? (Although a nasty number of them lived on us!) 

      During this time, I taught a few psychology courses at the local college, taught life skills and career planning, worked at an employment office. Oh, and I wrote. For the town's two newspapers, for regional magazines, even for the paper mill. Feeling brave, I wrote my first book, an 80,000 word adult science fiction novel. That's adult as in written for grown-ups, not adult in terms of content--though there was some of that, too. I recently pulled it out of a drawer and re-read it. Oh, man, is it awful. I chalk it up as part of my apprenticeship period. I've written ten novels since then, all of them for teens or pre-teens. Four are publishable, or will be with a bit of work. The rest--well, you aren't born a writer. There's that whole apprenticeship period, eh? The best part of my life so far, aside from writing, is being a mom to the two best kids on this planet. They are the type of people I have always wanted to become. (Okay, that's poor sentence construction, but you get my drift.) 

      When not writing, I can be found mucking around in my perennial gardens, birdwatching, camping (the real way, in a tent) or canoeing down a river in the wilderness with my husband.






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