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I’ve always loved reading and have read thousands of books in my lifetime. I tried to instill the same love of reading in my children, and did with some success. Writing was something I did frequently but, I didn’t recognize it as a talent or an accomplishment. It was just something that came quite easily to me.

As a lovestruck teen, I wrote poems to express my romantic feelings or my angst. Later, as a young adult, I wrote business letters for employers, personal letters to pen pals and, journal entries just for me. Occasionally a friend would ask me write a sympathy letter, an obituary or express their feelings in an editorial column. When I married, we owned a restaurant that benefitted from my newsletter subscribers. We held cooking classes that required original recipes written with clever descriptions and suggested table settings, wines and desserts. My first self-published work was a cookbook I wrote to benefit my children’s elementary school PTA, contained many of my own recipes as well as submissions from several parents. I added a blurb about the contributors and the volunteers who helped in promoting the book. In my last job, I wrote business letters and grants, ad copy, flyers, created a website and filled it with marketing content for the company. In 2004, I created my first blog, Sage Seeds, which served the readers information on health and wellness. In 2010 my website, www.americas-sports.com went live offering a comprehensive collection of sports fan gear and memorabilia.

Still, I didn’t consider myself a writer.

Did you ever see the joyfulness in a dog’s demeanor, who rolls on his back in the fresh spring grass? He bends and twists to get every inch of himself covered in that sweet fragrance. The sunshine and feeling of a new beginning titillates all his senses. Well, that’s pretty much how I took to retirement. Reveling in the thought that, “Now I have time…time to do anything my heart desires!”

Learning something new will forever give me the same grand feeling. When I embarked on this adventure, I knew it would be the learning that would get the juices flowing. Putting those first words on the page was both frightening and exhillarating.  And then I couldn’t…wouldn’t stop writing.

I am a writer, and the words have always been inside me, waiting to be set free.

History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.
Robert Penn Warren

I have a love for the days when life was a bit simpler, slower, less technologically influenced. Oh, I have alot of the conveniences available to us today, but I have always wished I’d grown up in the WWII era. I’ve romanticized that period probably more than it deserves, but the big band music, the heroic men and women, folks falling in love with a backdrop of bombs bursting in air…it all gets me stirred up.

It’s fitting then that my books are of the historical fiction genre. My first books will be a trilogy beginning with Irish immigrants making a life for themselves in the American midwest in the 1920s and 1930s. New York City in the 1940s and 1950s will be the backdrop for the second in the trilogy. The final book in the series will cover the third generation’s life in the 1960s and 1970s. Those 50+ years are so rich with historical events and intriguing people.

And after all that…ooh, I have so many more ideas!

Here I sit at my desk writing to my readers and crafting my novels. Here in my quaint central New York college town, I scan the shelves in our indie bookstore or peruse the pages of tomes at Amazon.com, seeking out my next great read. Here in my grand Victorian home, I watch the people walking by and wonder what secrets they keep and where their lives will take them. Story ideas surround me.

“Words are the voice of the heart.”
Confucius (c. 551-c. 479 BC), Chinese philosopher, founder of Confucianism

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