About Me
Now That I Got The Official Bio Out Of The Way, Let's Talk About Me
I remember the night my imagination kicked in. I’m of the television generation, so memories of my childhood are often earmarked by what TV shows were running at the time. The original Batman series ran from 1966 to 1968. Mr. Ed ended in 1966. I remember watching both about this time, so I must have been six when my little brain first engaged with the imaginary world.
My family lived in what we in Texas call a shotgun shack. My parents slept in a mid-century style double bed. Only back then it was new. My younger sister, Anna slept in a crib along the wall opposite the foot of the bed. I slept in a cot against the wall to the kitchen. The house was quiet. I stared into the darkness and played out a scene in my head where the villain had me tied at the waist by a rope, swinging over a bottomless pit, and Batman rescued me. The details evade me.
I’ve resided in my head ever since, jumping from one TV induced adventure to another. Cimarron, from the movie The Cowboys, and I had an ongoing romance all through my teens. I recently saw A Martinez in Tucson at the Festival of Books. Yeah, he’s still hot.
In school, I dabbled with writing and others recognize a talent, but I wanted to be an actor. Remember, TV generation. Barnabas Collins and Captain Kirk were my first loves, not the Brontë sisters. I was always acting out scenes in my head and having major conversations with the characters residing there.
Fast forward to my 30’s. How do you know when it’s time to get a divorce? When you muse that your police officer husband is killed in the line of duty and you take his pension, buy a van, travel the country, and end up on a ranch in the Dakotas, where you take horseback riding lessons from a 6’3” Native American man named Alexander. This is all hypothetical, of course.
Post-divorce, I had a good paying job that provided the independence needed to pursue my own interests, acting being one of those interests. Houston has a vibrant theatre community which offered the opportunity to work with local playwrights. It is fascinating to watch the process of characters on a page coming to life on the stage. The more I studied the complexity of the words on the page, the more intrigued I became with the writing process. After writing a very short and very, very, very bad play, I put the pen down and moved to Los Angeles to become a makeup artist. That’s a whole other story, maybe for a future blog.
This same time, I had developed an interest in John Wilkes Booth – as an actor, not as an assassin. He was quite the character. I came across him in a History of Theatre course at the University of Houston and again in a production of Assassins. While taking a thesis writing course at CalState Northridge, I had the idea for a book examining the shift of John Wilkes, the Brad Pitt of his day, to John Wilkes, that two-bit actor trying to make a name for himself. Without intending to, I slipped from acting to writing. I dropped the half-hearted attempt at a masters in theatre, started taking writing courses, and am still at it.
Since then, my writer’s journey has had lots of twists and turns. Remember that Native American named Alexander? He becomes an Apache, moves to Arizona, hooks up with a wild thing named Serena, and time warps to 1886. If you’ve managed to hang in this far, welcome to my world. Check out my blog for more to come.