Trust Issues won’t be my first book, but it is my first full collection of fictional stories. So, it’s a little like starting over. Becoming an author of fiction, telling stories that other people actually read and are entertained by has really been my goal all along. I belong to a generation of kids who kind of raised ourselves. Sure I had parents, but they were partying. They had good jobs, and I had food and clothes, even a car to drive when I got old enough, but I wasn’t the focus of anyone’s attention. I was an afterthought and an inconvenience, but I was smart, and I was very good at flying under the radar. I grew up playing by myself, and nobody missed me if I was gone.

So, when I could leave home, I left, only attending college to satisfy a promise I made to Mom to put in two years. I took that many classes in one year, and then went to work on a dive boat. I wanted to be a marine biologist, I thought, but it turned out that what I wanted was to go to sea. And I did, for many years. I bounced back and forth and did other things like get married, divorced, finish college, go back to sea, get married again… and so on.

I read voraciously during those traveling years. One has a lot of time on one’s hands at sea. When things happen they happen in a big way, but there’s a lot of sitting around waiting for things to happen. I kept on being smart, however, and never lost my knack for storytelling.

The sailing life came to an end when I had my first daughter. Husband and I moved to the States just in time to have a second daughter, and he learned a new career while I became a house wife. It is so hard for me to write that with no curse words in it. I cried for at least three years after coming back to the States. I was NOT HAPPY.

I was horrified to discover that jobs in America for mature women are a myth unless you want to wait tables for tips or greet people at Walmart. And while there’s all this beautiful open countryside here, you can’t afford to eat and live there. I had babies in a rural town and no way to help with supporting the family, because even if I took those lower paying jobs, they didn’t pay enough to cover the cost of gas and daycare.

So I wrote. I wrote a book about what I knew how to do, what I’d been doing for 15 years–working on yachts. That first book was called The Yachtie Bible: How to Get Paid While Traveling In Style. Please don’t rush out and buy it! It was full of contact information which can’t possibly be any good today.

The experience of researching and writing that first book surprised and delighted me, because I was able to prove to myself that I could do it–I had all the skills and talents I required to imagine and make a real volume, bound between bits of cardboard with useful information inside. It didn’t sell a lot, but I received little checks regularly. And I found an ally in the person of my husband’s aunt, who was an editor extraordinaire. She took this first little book to a big traditional publisher… walked it in the front door and handed it to the secretary of the acquisitions editor and suggested rather strongly that they should buy the rights to republish it. And they did! (Nobody ever heard of such a thing. I’ll tell you how The Yachtie Bible became Crewing Aboard a Superyacht next time!)

I’m spinning up the blog on my website, and it’s going to focus on my fiction, but in the interest of telling you a bit about the stories I tell in my fiction, I have to tell you about myself, in the real world.