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Welcome!

My web site has a whole new look, and with a book just coming out (CHANGE OF LIFE, Harlequin NeXT, December), I’ve been thinking a lot about Change itself. In these pages you’ll find quite a few of them.

Like most women I’ve had my share of change. But it all started, I’m happy to say, with a good beginning and strong family ties.

I grew up in a mid-sized town in northeast Ohio. My family, Mom, Dad and brother Gary, lived in a tidy, two-story, gray-shingled house that had been built—I kid you not—by my great grandmother. It’s family legend. Apparently her husband wasn’t too handy, or perhaps very well motivated, so she did the work herself! By the time I knew her this diminutive little lady, who was born on Christmas day, wore her long white hair coiled on her head. She lived to be over a hundred, but toward the end of her life she claimed she still felt like a bride. Inside, she told me, we’re always young.

Our big extended family gathered for birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, for christenings and weddings and funerals, even for no reason at all—or whenever any of us needed a little extra support in time of need. Among all those relatives—aunts, uncles, cousins—were a number of great role models. In addition to Great-grandma Marshall on my father’s side, my maternal grandmother and my own mother were strong, productive women. Career women who juggled work and family ahead of their time.

In general those were quieter, safer times. I could walk almost everywhere in town when I wasn’t riding my bike all over the place. The neighborhood kids played football and War and “rode” horses made on porch banisters. Weekly trips to the local library, a ten-minute walk along sun-dappled sidewalks that were arched by beautiful old trees, were a real pleasure, the start of a reading obsession and my desire to write. The Tobey Heydon books by Rosamond du Jardin were probably my first foray into the world of fictional romance or women’s fiction.

And I started to write. A teen-age serial was passed around in study hall each day, and later I imagined myself to be the next Francoise Sagan whose Bonjour Tristesse was very big then. After college I headed for New York with my new B.A. in English, hoping to take the publishing world by storm. As my day job I worked for a literary agent, who as serendipity would have it, years later became my own first agent, then for a textbook publisher. I wrote a few stories, collected some encouraging rejections, but by then, romance had left my fictional world and entered the real one. I was in love.

After the wedding my new husband and I moved to Kansas, the first of several long-distance relocations so he could continue his education. By the time we moved back East to CT, Don had earned his Ph.D., we had two sons, and I was finally putting my lifelong desire to write into real practice. I sold a first confession story (great training ground), a second, a third, then a novella, and when glitz and glamour took off, I tried a full novel a la Sidney Sheldon. When Warner offered me a contract for HEARTSONG, I felt I had found my fictional “home.”

But there were more changes ahead—another move from New Haven to Ohio, this time the southern part near Cincinnati, and I was writing for Harper. Sometimes it seems those early books were written from the back of a moving van!

Then, four years ago, came another shift from Cincinnati to Chattanooga. Seems I just can’t get away from those “C” names.

Am I finally settled? I sure hope so.

Still, Change in some way is…a constant. Last year my mother-in-law made her own move from New York to be near us, and right now a new kitty is scampering around my office, as if wishing I’d get off this computer to play with her again. She’s a gorgeous Himalayan, a long-haired bundle of energy with a mischievous glint in her beautiful blue eyes, and I’m so glad she has joined our household.

New pets, new places, the births of children then grandchildren, the sad loss of parents, the triumphs and challenges of a writing career (or any career), even the ups and downs of a relationship over time are all part of our lives. Lucky for me, I’m a Gemini and the Twins don’t like to feel bored!

Change makes life interesting, often exciting, and provides us with ever more opportunities to grow—just like my heroine Nora Pride, whom you’ll meet in CHANGE OF LIFE. Nora not only survives her changes but thrives. I like to think I do too.

And speaking of Change, be sure to check out this month’s column on the seasons in my new neck of the woods.