About Author

Fourth grade started, and the Little Girl was lucky again. The seventh and eighth graders were sent to school in town in October, and she got to move to the principal’s classroom. Miss Fletcher asked her to read a page in her reader, and the Little Girl said Miss King said she would never learn to read. Miss Fletcher said that wasn’t true. She gave her a book and a dictionary and told her how to read the whole book. It took two days to read that mystery book, and the little girl thought there was nothing better on Earth than reading. She read all the books on the three library shelves before the end of fourth grade.

When it was time to go to fifth grade, her parents gave her a library card, and she rode the bus into town lots of Saturdays to go to the library. When she wasn’t reading, there were many kids in the neighborhood to play with, and she often went to her grandparents’ farm to pick strawberries and play in the creek with her cousins.

When it was time for the Little Girl to enter seventh grade, her parents decided she and her sister should attend Lutheran School. The Little Girl was lucky again, because the summer before eighth grade, she grew several inches, although she was still very thin.

She was glad she was taller when she went to the city school in ninth grade. She did well in her classes and especially liked home economics, where she had a bit of bad luck when she and her partner caught their stove on fire, and the firemen had to come. The next semester was sewing, and she did very well in that, as she had been sewing clothes for her sister’s dolls since fifth grade. The drama department was to put on a spring play and needed a lot of costumes. Mrs. Mullins, her teacher, told her to design the clothes and help the rest of the class to sew them. She was a very lucky girl when the teacher offered to send her to Paris the next year to learn fashion design. She knew it was a great opportunity but didn’t want to leave home so young.

The Girl wasn’t so lucky in high school. She did well in all her classes except English. Whenever she wrote something, the teachers always gave her C’s or lower. She worked very hard on her senior paper because it interested her. She even wrote a few political jokes about the word “prestige,” which came from a word that meant “a pickpocket.” The student teacher gave her an A plus and said she didn’t know high school students could write that well. The teacher snatched it back, read a little of it, and put a “D” on it. She said the Girl had to have cheated. The Girl knew she had to be a good writer if the teacher thought she copied.

The Girl went off to college and found it was harder than high school, but she was having a wonderful time. She joined the Bridge Club and learned there was another kind of luck. She won the tournament and a trip to Chicago by dumb luck and told someone else to go. She joined the Newspaper and wrote about a speaker coming to talk about his trip to Viet Nam in 1965. He was uninvited, and she was told the paper didn’t need her.

Luck seemed to have abandoned her, but she was having a great time. An English teacher with a reputation for flunking a lot of students convinced her she would flunk out. Luck showed up again. He gave her an A+, had her read her paper to all his students, and used it in a book he was writing.

She met the man of her dreams the summer before her junior year. They decided to get married the next summer since they were both broke. Her favorite class was premed in her senior year, and good luck showed up again. She was called in by the head of the department and was offered a free ride to the U of I medical school in Chicago. That was not a career she wanted after hearing about sick people from her mother, a registered nurse.

She married the man of her dreams, and they went to Colorado to teach, to hike, to ski, and to enjoy being hippies. She read a book one day and thought she could write better than that. She didn’t convince any editors that she was that good, but she kept writing.

She and Ric returned to Illinois. He worked as an industrial electrician, and she went back to making bouquets, which she had done since she was sixteen. There was only one thing missing—children—and there weren’t going to be any in the natural way.

She and Ric adopted a ten-year-old son and, two years later, half-sisters (8 and 10). She sold a few of her paintings and then her activity book for church camp leaders. The children grew; she sold some stories to religious magazines, and talked her congregation into performing her plays about the last week of Christ’s life. For two Easters, they delighted and shocked audiences with their plays. She sold the plays as “You Are the Christ,” a book still available in English and some other languages.

The children continued to grow. She kept on writing and sending out stories and book-length manuscripts. Some stories sold. The manuscripts came back with sometimes nice notes and sometimes coffee stains. The children started graduating from high school and having children, and one went off to college.

She and Ric had never heard of Preppers, but they decided to build a small log cabin on a farm they bought, cutting down trees on the land. That was a three-year project with two grandsons playing in the sand in the middle of the cabin. It was finished just in time for our daughter to turn over custody of her two boys to us, and we became parents to a four- and five-year-old. I wrote more books that didn’t sell. Ric became an industrial arts teacher at the boys’ school. Life went on with less time to write as our daughter gave us custody of an eighteen-month-old girl. Our joke was that God had listened to our prayers for children, but He was working on a different timetable. Soon after this, our daughter gave us her last child, a three-year-old son.

Life got really busy as I was substitute teaching, rehabbing rental units, raising four children and a garden, being an officer in a local writing club, and somehow no longer sending my manuscripts in to publishers as I had for a long time. Sixteen book-length manuscripts lie on the shelf in my library. Many short stories are in my computer.

The kids grew up. Our oldest boy had a girlfriend and a daughter. The next grandson married and became a trucker.  The third grandson went to Brown University and was on track for the Olympics when he injured his back. The granddaughter had a son. And their mother came home to die of cancer.

Then Covid came. Our granddaughter and great-grandson were living with us. Our youngest grandson came home from China on the last flight out, and I had time to write and rewrite and join Fanstory.

Suddenly, I was writing a lot, people at Fanstory seemed to enjoy my stories, and I discovered some of them were publishing books. However, I learned publishing wasn’t the same thing as it had once been. Now, publishers rarely buy books from unknown writers. Now writers paid publishers to print their books. The authors had web pages and were expected to do lots of things online and in person to sell their books. If they prove to be good writers with a following, they are more likely to be bought by a book company to write and publish their books.

Ric and I are doing well, not rich but comfortable, and this lovely young man at a company called Best Books Company was interested in my manuscript. Chris Anderson became my agent to get my book published. I sometimes felt I was lost in a publishing whirlwind, but Chris was there to help me understand what I needed to do. I now have a book on my desk instead of a manuscript on a shelf. My mystery book is called Death by Dissolution.

My granddaughter is using her videoing skills to make a video of me talking about my trip through publishing from submission to having this wonderful book in my hands. I will make appearances at bookstores, I will have a website to work with, and I am not sure where the adventure will go from there. Hopefully, snagging an audience, as I have a second mystery book and a third follow-up waiting to get themselves printed.

That lucky Little Girl is a very happy Lady of a certain age.