Most of this site is devoted to my latest novel, Twenty-One Steps of Courage.  The idea for this story came while listening to a 4th Grade teacher tell her students about the Soldiers who guard the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington, Cemetery. I began researching the novel in 2006. Read more about that exciting experience on the About the Research page.

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    I’ve been writing since I was a kid. Of course at first, not much happened with it. You know, book reports, then essays, then business writing that took me into marketing and advertising. Lots of fun but excruciating deadlines.

    After leaving advertising in 2000 to write text for a book packager, I began a three-year stint writing features for the Fallbrook/Bonsall Village News. Seven of those stories garnered Society of Professional Journalists awards.

It was then I ventured into the world of make believe, writing fiction between newspaper deadlines. I nearly levitated when my first short story showed up in the San Diego North County Times newspaper. Following this momentous event my writing appeared in Bravura, the literary magazine of Palomar College. Then in 2005, along with author Carmi Cosmos, we published Out of Our Minds, Wild Stories by Wild Women.

     I live in Fallbrook, California with my husband Jim Bates who is a fine art watercolor painter, my dog Mika and a cat, Busterina. When I am not writing I  work as a writing tutor for the English Department of Palomar College.

My writing group, the Fallbrook Professional Writers has been together for ten years.

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Photo captions: Sgt. Mike D., research contact, Iraq; Me in a Humvee at the National Training Center in the California Mohave Desert

(RIGHT) 2012 SAN DIEGO LOCAL AUTHOR BOOK AWARDS, FEBRUARY 2013