Hi! You’ve looked all over the vast expanse of the internet, and you’ve finally found me! Congratulations! Read the blog. Send me a message. Buy a book. Heck, buy two books.
If you found me by accident and were actually trying to find recipes for beer-batter fish, stick around anyway and let’s start with a little thing called a bio:
—-
TL;DR: I enjoy typewriters, tech gadgets, cruise ships, crocheting, air conditioning, cats, guinea pigs, semi-tame squirrels, meandering around Sam’s Club looking for huge vats of salsa, and anything else that lends a grand sense of bold adventure to my life.
Because clearly I’m an adrenaline junkie.
—-
In the early 1980s, I pursued a writing degree from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa. I kept pursuing it, but to this day it still eludes me.
I’ve since worked behind the scenes in publishing as a proofreader, copy editor, and typesetter. I’ve worked with publishers such as Carroll & Graf, Shoemaker & Hoard, Crown & Covenant Publications, Pegasus Books, and F+W Publications. I still sometimes proofread author manuscripts being prepped for submission to agents and editors.
I’m on the board of the St. Davids Christian Writers’ Association, as well as the board of publication of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America. For a handful of years, I also served as author liaison for the Beaver County BookFest in western Pennsylvania.
Oh, wait. You want to read about my writing? Fair enough. That’s why you’re here. That, or the beer-batter fish thing.
Several chapters of my very first novel, Gray Area, won awards at the St. Davids conference long before I published it. The entire novel placed as a semifinalist in the national Jerry Jenkins contest Operation First Novel in 2004. My second novel, Do-It-Yourself Widow (which I’m still editing—don’t judge), fared even better. The opening chapter placed first at St. Davids in 2005, and the entire novel placed as a top-four runner-up in the Jerry Jenkins Operation First Book contest in 2006.
In recent years, my short humor essays have garnered numerous awards—from a national contest on BrassRing.com (which came with a really big check that didn’t bounce!) to the Hall of Fame in two categories at the St. Davids Writers’ Conference (Humor and Fiction).
My favorite writing challenge, though, has often been the yearly contest known as National Novel Writing Month: writing 50,000 words of a single new fiction project during the month of November. I loved the pressure of a ridiculous, forced deadline. I’m currently tinkering with several of these crazy manuscripts, trying to beat them into submission so I can send them out into the world.
I also enjoy “Weird Al” Yankovic music, computer gadgets, movies, crocheting, reading, and guinea pigs. I live in western Pennsylvania with my long-suffering engineer husband, Wayne Parker. We have six children between us, all of them now grown and living their own stories. We upgraded ourselves to grandparent status in June 2018 with the arrival of Arthur (that’s “King Arthur” to you!). His arrival—followed by a second grandchild, Anina (that’s “Lady Anina” to you, peasant!), and then a third, (Prince) Felix—convinced me that life really doesn’t get any better than this.
And… I keep writing. And listening to “Weird Al.”
