Book Worm Muse

     Why do I write?  I have been writing stories and poems since I was 10 years old.  We had a great aunt who lived with us.  My great uncle was MOA in the Korean War and my aunt was from Germany and didn’t speak English very well.  So every week she would buy a Golden Book and we would sit down at bed time to read.  She had an attic room my Dad had fixed up as bedroom/sitting room.  Aunt Tina worked at the telephone company and it was very important to her to learn English correctly and I was 3 years old when she came to live with us.  My brother and sister where 6 and 7 years older then me, so they were not interested in their baby sister.  I learned to read by the age of three.  My aunt’s language skills improved and I could read on my own, but we would climb up the stairs to her room and read a book and eat apples every night.

 

During my school years I read 6-8 books a week.  My teachers didn’t believe me and in the fourth grade, my teacher would make me write a short book report on every book I read until I proved to her I was really reading them.

 

We moved and Aunt Tina stayed behind to work for the telephone company and wait for a husband who never came home.  Instead of having someone to read with at night, I would tell myself stories, starring me of course as the hero.

 

This may come as a shock, but when I graduated from high school, I didn’t have the career chooses that women have today.  I could be a teacher, secretary, nurse or housewife.  Or at least those where the ones I could get help with.  So I became a nurse.

 

I worked a varied nursing jobs and worked my way up to an assistant director on nursing in a large hospital.  Than I became the tuberculosis nurse consultant for the state of Kentucky.  By now I had two children and I wanted to go in the service.  Unfortunately, women with dependent children could not be in the service at that time.  So I worked on my BS degree and when I turned 35, they were allowing women with dependents in the service.  So I joined.  My first station was Alaska.  The ALCAN Hwy was still mostly dirt and gravel.

 

While in the service, I did a lot of different things and my partner was a retired Viet Nam Special Forces Ranger.  He had been a medic in the service and became a nurse.  I learned a phenomenal amount of stuff from him and his wife helped me survive with my children.

 

Along the way I trained as an EMT, Firefighter, TEMS (medical member of the SWAT team) and just about anything else I could learn.

 

I usually worked nights, and sometimes we would have down times when we could talk.  When the people I worked with heard some of the stories I told or could tell, they said I should write a book.  So I did.  Some of it’s true, and a lot is made up, I just tell people they have to guess which is which.  The people, who have been kind enough to read my writing, say it’s pretty good and no one guessed who “had done it”.  So now I’m still writing, on my second book and sending out query letters in hopes of getting it published.

 

My genre is mostly mystery; it has some romance at times and a touch of the paranormal. 

I sometimes tell people it has lots of violence with gratuitous sex,

 

I write because I have ideas and would like to see them on paper.  I know what I enjoy reading and what I want in a book.  I read to escape the real world and enter one where the character is actually able to make a difference and do it with style and panache.

 

I hope someday people look back on my books, like I do at Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton, Anne MacCraffery, J.B. Robb, Dan Silva, Jim Butcher, Hamilton, Charlene Harris, Evonovich, Rowling,and the hundreds of more that have set the stage so authors can use their imaginations and make their own worlds.