I was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at Our Lady of the Lake hospital.

We moved around a lot because my dad was in the oil and gas business, which required a lot of moving around. When I was twelve, we ended up in Houston, Texas. Eventually, the rest of my family went back to Louisiana, leaving me behind. I don’t think this was planned.

Everything about me was a little off in high school. It was the Seventies, and hippies were over, and yet I liked Bob Dylan, was a vegetarian, and was very sure I’d been born a decade too late. I felt as if I’d missed it all, and I hadn’t even gotten started.

I was shy and geeky as a teenager, but I was also curious and focused. Unfortunately, my lack of confidence kept me from doing what I wanted to do, which was move to Paris and write and speak French. Instead, I went with my love of math and got an engineering degree. After college, I worked for NASA and was caught up in the excitement of shuttle missions. But still . . .

. . . I couldn’t stop writing. I wrote – short stories, abandoned chapters of novels, poems – whenever I could. I found I wanted to talk to others about stories I’d read and those I’d written and started taking writing and literature classes, eventually getting a MA in Literature and teaching writing for a few years while I raised my two wonderful kids.

I finally finished a novel, after many, many (many) tries. It wasn’t published.

But I finished another, and it was.