About Me

Ever since I was itty bitty, I have loved to read.  I wasn’t quite as enchanted with writing, but I was good at it and became very proficient in English, maybe partially because my mother had been an English teacher. 

In school, I enjoyed classes involving writing, but it wasn’t until I began working that I did a lot more. I wrote a number of proposals, several for funding for scientific studies and one for a establishing a program for gifted/talented students, most of which accepted, that I began to enjoy writing. After I became a technical writer, then an environmental engineer, for Westinghouse, I wrote a lot more, particularly technical writing. 

Years later, I quit my day job, which I hated—I was the co-owner of an environmental consulting firm and was tired of that feast or famine existence (i.e., having to write proposals constantly, even when I was working on a project that had been funded). I had decided to write a book about football for women because I had learned a lot about the game in order to make my marriage even better than it was. I wrote the book, then realized that I had become “too old” to be employable as an environmental engineer. Stupid, but true.

I got a job with the local board of Realtors(symbol) as their education coordinator. It wasn’t long before I realized that real-estate agents and other professionals involved in the buying and selling of homes were in panic mode because of the fear of mold: people were getting sick because of the incursion of mold into homes that had become water damaged. It occurred to me that, because of my background in science and engineering, I could prepare a course to help these people deal with the mold issue. I did, with the assistance of one of my instructors who taught a number of courses for the board. 

After teaching a few such courses, it became apparent that we needed a book because we used about a million handouts, and each one had to be given to each student—which was my job. So I made a call to the publisher responsible for publishing all the books used by my instructors and was hired to write the book, The Truth About Mold, and an accompanying online course. The book and course are currently in their third editions.

Since then, I have taken a number of writing courses, particularly about fiction and speculative fiction, which I love doing. I am a member of a local writing group, Lost Echoes, Albuquerque Writers, and contributed a number of stories and memoirs to an anthology, Lost Echoes Found: an Anthology of Speculations and Memories. I edited the book.