I wrote the first sketch for Dolet about four years after my husband’s death in 1996 from Parkinson’s disease. I knew a good deal about interesting figures from the sixteenth-century in France, since that was my main research-field. I had published three scholarly books on François Rabelais (1494 [ca]-1553) and a novel in French translation…
All of my adult life I’ve been a proponent of healthy eating. It’s a passion of mine. And one day, while in my early-forties, I decided to do something about it. I left my job as real estate manager for McDonald’s Corporation in Southern California and went back to school, earning a master’s in nutritional…
Don’t Hit Me! is a unique book about the intricacies of abuse. I was looking through a journal from my time in a violent relationship and realised I had captured domestic violence in real time. I decided to self-publish my raw journal with minimal editing, keeping it organic. The narrative is conveyed through journal entries,…
A lunch date with a friend about two years ago birthed the idea for my latest novel, THE SILVER LOCKET. Patty and I had known each other for about five years and shared a number of common interests but it wasn’t until that particular lunch date that Patty confided her story to me. Growing up…
When I was in the military, I always wrote about my experiences, from the mundane to the exciting, from the frustrating to the terrifying. It was a way to process what I was going through, and to help others understand or relate to my service. Flight of the Blue Falcon represents the culmination of my…
I was working nights as a token booth clerk for the NYC subway, when I noticed that a group of young men and boys was constantly running up and down the stairs, to and from the street, at all hours of the night. It appeared that they ranged in age from 12 years to 20…
The story behind my novel, as with most novels, evolved significantly over time though the bones always remained the same. For several years, I worked as a therapist in our states most acute psychiatric hospital where the most chronically mentally ill patients lived, often for the rest of their lives. Over the years, I saw…
The inspiration for my book, BlackJack, came from my love of music. I will be honest, when I wrote this book twelve years ago, no editor or agent wanted to hear about a book about a rock star. But I didn’t give up. It might have taken me twelve years and many re-writes to publish…
The Story Behind the Book 