I’ve been a Southern California girl my whole life. To escape the noise, smog and traffic of the city, I moved to Pine Mountain Club twenty-seven years ago and have lived here ever since.

I forgot I loved to write until I decided to transcribe my teenage diary a few years ago. I’d written almost three-hundred binder pages filled with detailed accounts of events, including virtually word-for-word conversations.

While transcribing my diary I was inspired to write a memoir which I submitted to an editor who told me it wasn’t quite publishable and to put it aside and try writing fiction, then go back to the memoir with new eyes.

The idea of writing a fiction novel was daunting. How could anyone think of eighty-thousand words to say about anything? With a memoir the story was already there, so telling it had to be easier than making up a story, or so I thought.

The idea for my first fiction novel, “The Art of Surprise” came to me in an unexpected way. I found a writing contest on a writers’ support group website, although the contest originated from a different website. I decided to enter, writing a two-thousand-word story that was required to have only dialogue.

Believing I was submitting my story two weeks before the deadline, I went to the contest website and found that the original website that advertised the contest got the deadline wrong. I was two weeks late. So I put the story aside and forgot about it, almost.

One night while having dinner at a restaurant with my best friend, I asked her if I could tell her my story. When I was done her eyes bugged out and she exclaimed that the story was intriguing with so many twists and turns. She said she saw it as a movie or a TV series.

That’s when I decided to take my very short story and make it one small element of a full-length novel, followed by two other novels in the series of three. So, writing eighty-thousand words or even two-hundred-fifty thousand words wasn’t as difficult as I first thought.

If a reader wonders how I came up with the concept for my novels I must give my parents, especially my mother, some credit. I grew up with a mother and father who occasionally worked in community theater and loved to come up with imaginative, if not comical ideas. My father was more low-key than my mother. She probably thought of herself as not only Lucy, of Lucy and Ethel, but also an amateur writer for Candid Camera.

It wasn’t a surprise that the minister at my mother’s funeral portrayed her as a character. He could have called her a narcissist, but he was too kind to use that word. I, having the traditional love-hate relationship with my mother, had spent my entire life trying to be the opposite of her.

It wasn’t until my late forties that I too became a community theater actor and ten years later wrote three books involving activities my parents would have been proud to come up with.