While growing up in the rural countryside of Kentucky, I was surrounded by an eclectic group of family and friends. My earliest recollections are of living in the little white house on Orchard Avenue in Louisville. Luckily, the house next door was occupied by my aunt, uncle, and cousins. We spent our days knee-deep in lip syncing to our favorite songs by the Partridge Family, the Osmonds, and the Defranco Family. Hours and hours passed as we put an old black boxlike tape recorder to good use as we self-recorded song after song. When we weren’t singing or choreographing dance routines to the songs, Barbie doll and her friends took up the rest of our time.
On the weekends, the family of my house as well as the one next door would pack up our vehicles and head to Campbellsville where we spent nearly every weekend with both paternal and maternal grandparents. The luggage had barely hit the floor of my grandparents’ tiny house before my cousins and I would venture outside to trap honeybees in thick glass mason jars only to release them at nightfall and repeat the trapping on lightning bugs. Once it was really dark, we’d spend the next several hours playing hide-and-seek. From my grandparents’ yard all the way to Mr. Minor’s barn at the top of the hill was fair game, and the games lasted most weekends till way after nightfall. Then we’d return back to my grandparents’ house and take claim to the big concrete porch where we’d sit with our feet hanging from the tall porch and sing once again the songs we’d prerecorded. It wasn’t an unusual sound to hear the early songs of Donny Osmond and Tony Defranco echoing from the hillside.
By middle school, we’d moved to Greensburg to farms alongside one another and added another family of cousins. Here, we had almost three-hundred acres to explore either on foot or atop tiny mini-bikes. Over the summers we spent there, we searched caves, dropped from grapevines into the muddy water of the Green River and ran, on more than one occasion, from an old graveyard that was hidden alongside the river road. Many summers we fished and hiked along the river’s edge and painted pictures of its raging waters on easels stuck inches into its muddy banks.
If I had to mark a point in my life where I started to consider writing as a career, it would probably be here. It started simply enough, recording the daily happenings from my favorite soap opera, The Young and the Restless. My aunt said once that reading what I wrote was better than watching the actual shows because I added my own commentary. The stories of my youth were born here and grew year by year to exist almost as a living, breathing companion to me.
By now, we had moved again to a small country store at the crosswalk of hwy 88 and Pierce Road in the heart of Donansburg. Managing a store was a big commitment for my family as either me or my father had to be there at all times. It was here I penned my first story. I called it “The Idol” and all of my romantic scenes went something like this: and they kissed. By the end of the summer, I’d finished the story with the help of one of my best friends. She’d edited all the romantic scenes to be “juicier.” Decades later, only a handful of pragmatic moments from that very first story would make an appearance on the pages of The Town Time Forgot.
I spent a lot of time writing either poetry or short stories after I finished “The Idol.” I wrote mostly about my family, especially my cousins. Like a time capsule, the dancing, recordings, baseball, and lightning bugs were all there on the pages, reflecting back as if begging to relived all over again.
By the time I was in high school, as much as I loved writing, I realized I wasn’t much of a risk-taker and decided instead to focus on something I was sure I could make a good living at, but I did continue to write my short stories. Only now, the themes were more mature, sadder sometimes as the challenges of life invaded my very content and “perfect” life.
I attended the University of Kentucky and Broward College in Fort Lauderdale, graduated with a doctorate in pharmacy from Nova Southeastern University and later obtained an MBA. During this time, my family made many trips to the family graveyard as we laid grandparents, aunts, and uncles to rest. As a result, I focused mostly on being a good wife and mother, and the time I allotted to writing was minimal.
In 2011, my father passed away, I would classify this period in my life as a time of great reflection. By then, I ‘d written approximately thirty-four publications in the health-and-science industry and five book contributions (also medical). I’d been interviewed for fifteen television programs or newspaper articles and participated in over fifty healthcare-related speaking events. I’d had a short story published (“My Name is Edith”) for the Broward College newspaper and an X-Files story (“H2O”) that appeared in a magazine entitled To the Fullest Xtent.
With as much success as I’d had in professional writing, there remained a burning question in my mind. I continually asked myself what would happen if I tried my hand at writing for real? I took some time after my father’s death and wrote The Town Time Forgot. At 700 plus pages, it was a daunting endeavor and the subject matter was well outside my comfort zone. When it was finished, I felt good about the story and knew I’d grown as a writer and challenged myself to write situations that were very different from the stories of my youth.
Not long after that I penned an award-winning children’s book “Ms. Abrams’ Everything Garden.” I also wrote a children’s fantasy book Place Where Magic Lives: Into the Woods. Three adult stories—Yellow River Pledge, Sanctuary Road, and Journeys soon followed. Additionally, last fall I was fortunate enough to work with the Broward Movie Makers to produce a screenplay, Second Chances, which has been submitted to various film festivals.
In 2019 my new book Place Where Magic Lives: Walking the Plank was released and my current publisher, Kingston, rereleased Town Time Forgot as a series. The first book, Turbulence, was just released in April 2019. Book two, Crossroads, and book three, Terminus should be released by the year’s end. Over the summer, Kingston Publishing will release several new series, two of which I’m participating in. Chimera, a part of the series Rescue Me, should be released during the summer of 2019. I’ve plans to release book three in the Place Where Magic Lives series, as well.
Although my writing career hasn’t been in existence that long, I like to think I’ve been writing all my life mostly about my life. I’m asked all the time if any of the characters or situations in the adult stories are “real.” I usually respond, “Of course not” and wink.
Amazon Links:
Place Where Magic Lives: Into the Woods
Place Where Magic Lives: Walking the Plank
Turbulence: The Town Time Forgot Book 1
