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The mind behind the story
Every adult is a product of their childhood experiences. My experiences evolved on a small Kansas farm, surrounded by animals, fields of wheat and alfalfa, and sunshine. Our huge white barn was populated by cats, barn owls, and the occasional snake brought in with the hay. We had fruit trees, berry bushes, a garden filled with vegetables, and a chicken house filled with hens and eggs. We had cows and hogs. I spent summers covered with chigger bites. When I woke up at night, I heard not police sirens but howling coyotes.
I soon discovered reading. Sitting on my mother’s lap as she read books and magazines, I pointed to word after word, letter after letter, while she patiently told me their names. By age four, I was reading on my own. We had no children’s books, so I grew up on a steady diet of The Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies Home Journal. Anything I didn’t understand, I either figured out or made up my own explanations.
The two themes of my childhood, the living world and the written word, came together in college. The living world was easy. At the University of Kansas, I majored in zoology and later, at the University of Georgia, specialized in marine ecology.
The written word was harder. My favorite books were fiction stories that grabbed me, characters that spoke to me. In college, I discovered science fiction and fantasy. I read everything from J.R.R. Tolkien to Kurt Vonnegut and watched every Star Trek movie. But, at the time, I didn’t see writing becoming a career (Me? Make a living writing books? That could never happen!)
So … I concentrated on science education. I taught college biology. I wrote online science curricula and science questions for standardized tests. And finally, I began to write books. I’ve written about 70 nonfiction books, mostly for high school students (a few for middle school). Many are ecology- or environmental science-based.
And for a while, I was satisfied. But a niggling voice inside me kept saying, “You should write stories!” I spent years on my first novel: pages of notes, scribbled scenes and chapters. It had (no surprise) a science fiction basis, but the story was more about the characters than the science. As with all good stories, it was about how the science or the science fiction affected the characters.
My first goal was simply to prove I could write a novel. And I did, eventually. Once it was written, I didn’t want to stop. I discovered independent publishing and thought, “Why not? I’ll publish it on Amazon and maybe I’ll sell five or ten books.”
So here we are. I’ve now published Book 3 of a four-book series, Sam and Jade’s Alien Adventures, and am working on Book 4. Where did the aliens come from? Who knows? I’ve always looked at the stars and wondered, “What else or who else is out there?” So, I wrote about one possibility, drawing on the inspiration of people who think they exist and are already here. I like to think they’re right. 😊
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