There is Always a Hero

My life as a writer began when I was about 10. My friend Lonnie and I were absolutely besotted with ‘Rawhide’ and Clint Eastwood. Life began and ended on Friday nights in front of the television. One episode a week with Rowdy Yates wasn’t enough so Lonnie and I wrote complete episodes on our own and would curl up on the weekends and read our scripts out loud.

I graduated to poetry in university and wrote ‘Ode to a Teabag’ with another friend, Judy. Sitting in the cafeteria at lunch, we drank endless cups of tea and decided to salute the teabag with a poem. We each wrote a short verse and read our gems to a group of red-sweatered engineering students. They all pretended to be impressed.

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Writing creatively soon took a back seat to university essays and exams and lesson planning as a new teacher and it wasn’t until I took a fateful summer holiday trip to Ireland with my mother Leta that I left the world of just reading romances and romantic suspense and found an idea for my own book. Mother and I sat in a ferry waiting room in Wales, ready for the middle of the night sailing to Ireland and watching the intriguingly diverse group of people spread out around us. I had talked to my mother about wanting to write a novel and I remember her saying “Why don’t you start one in this room…look at all of these characters!” That novel is now ‘Dancing in the Mist’, the first book of the ‘Butterfly Trilogy.’

Living in Vancouver, I have felt a number of earthquake tremors over the years. Some were like shimmying shivers on the floor under my feet. Some made my houseplants shake. One more nightmarish tremor made the echoing sound of grinding earth plates come up through the plumbing pipes in my apartment building in the middle of the night. During my teaching career we had many earthquake-evacuation drills with our classes. That novel is now ‘Tremors of the Heart’, inspired by trips down the Oregon Coast and walks on California’s Big Sur beaches. I love the ocean and waves!

My husband Colin and I have always been travelers. Each trip has brought inspiration for a story. I was especially intrigued by the rugged coastline of Cornwall, England and the castle history of Northumberland, England. Those books are now ‘A Perfect Star Gazing Night’ and ‘Castles Under Siege’ (books 2 and 3 of the ‘Butterfly Trilogy.’)

I loved writing with my classes. I taught mostly Grades 4 and 5 over the years of my teaching career and loved creating theme units and building them around the prescribed curriculum. That love of being creative forms the basis of the non-fiction biography of my final year of teaching. One of my former students, Lyndsay, is now a published author herself and I loved reading her stories. One of my other students had an amazing love of big and unusual words. He would use the word ‘substantial’ in a myriad of ways and it was this student who gave me the name for that book, ‘A Substantial Career.’ Thank you to Charles.

My husband is a car guy. Particularly pre-war British cars and I have learned to love Rolls-Royces and Lagondas and Bentleys. I tested a children’s story with a primary class at my school and made it into a goblins and fairies story called ‘The Case of the Missing Lady’…about the theft of the Flying Lady mascot/hood ornament on a Rolls-Royce. The main detective is an Irish setter. A friend, Jelena, is a gifted painter and illustrated this book for me.

But my true love …both to read and to write…is romantic suspense. Why? Because: ‘There is Always a Hero.’