Can you tell us a little about you and how you came to be a writer?
I wrote both stories and poetry when I was a child and an adolescent, but in college and graduate school (I was planning a career in college teaching) I lost the creative urge. After switching to librarianship, I finally read Lord of the Rings at age 29. It was a real revelation! Here was this erudite professor, J.R.R. Tolkien, who made up his own worlds and created his own languages throughout his entire life. I had done
those things as a child, but I thought that adults gave up such silliness!
At that point I started writing, creating semi-Tolkienesque fantasy worlds, and I started reading fantasy and some science fiction. I was especially drawn to Ursula K. LeGuin.
I wrote that type of material from 1969 through 1983, sending some of it to publishers and collecting rejection slips. This was long before the days of easy self-publishing and as a librarian I was savvy enough to know that vanity presses were not the way to go. I was just beginning to get some encouragement when family problems (elderly relatives who needed attention) forced me to give up writing for 17 years.
In the year 2000 I was finally at leisure to begin writing again. The purchase of my first computer made everything so much easier (no more writing in long hand and then tediously typing the manuscripts).
I had a lot of pent-up creativity and so for eleven years I wrote for
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