I’m a headbanging grandmother with 28 years’ experience as a paralegal. I was the only kid in elementary school who got excited whenever the teacher told us to write a story using all of our spelling words. I’ve been writing weird and twisted tales ever since. After reading one of my stories featuring a teen-aged boy who kept a dead body in the crawlspace under his house, my grandmother asked me, “Can’t you write about something happy?” And the answer is an unequivocal, “No. I can’t. It’s not in my personality.”

There are two things that greatly influence my writing and provide fuel for my fictional fires. One is music and the other is dreams. Cold Comfort was inspired by two songs: “Sanitarium (Welcome Home)” by Metallica, and “Uncle Jack” by Motley Crue. Cold Comfort is also loosely autobiographical (no, I’m not schizophrenic) in that, like me, the main character must come to terms with being “different” from everyone around him, while struggling to accept the hand that life has dealt him.

My favorite story to write is one which evokes deep emotions in the reader. A central theme to the majority of my fiction is the feeling of being different and the struggle to be accepted and to be free of the people and things which oppress.

I'm currently working on The Fourth Empire, a dystopian series co-written with my good friend, Susanne Larssen Chetkowski. The working title for the first book in that series is There Must Be Order.