How It All Started, Fifty-Plus Years Ago
My mom and dad grew up in Eugene, Oregon and married while they were students at the university there. My dad went off to fly SBD's in the Pacific theater during WWII. When he returned, they got me, their post-war baby, born May 19, 1948. I had a good time growing up in Eugene but by age eighteen, I wanted OUT.

Then Came the Summer of Love and the Days of Rage
In 1966 I left for Stanford University. Heady experience, being so near San Francisco in the late sixties. I took creative writing courses at Stanford but ran out of stories I thought worth telling. I was bound for Harvard Law School when I got diverted by an ex-Marine just returned from Vietnam. We got married.

Woman Truck Driver
From 1971 until 1975 we were long-haul truckers for North American Van Lines, one of the first husband-wife teams in their Electronics and Exhibits Division. During those four years I traveled 450,000 miles in forty-eight states and Canada. I can still talk about Detroit Diesel engines and Spicer 10-speed transmissions and I've seen as much of the USA as you can from the interstate highway system.

Beef Farmer and Youth Worker
In 1976, I settled on a hundred-acre farm in Starks, Maine and started raising Black Angus beef. No money in that, so I got a job in a private non-profit agency working with delinquent kids.

My First Spy
After I earned my masters degree in Public Administration from the University of Maine, I took over as Executive Director of the youth-serving agency where I'd started as a counselor. Our most notorious client was Michael Lance Walker. I designed the alternative educational program that kept him from dropping out of high school. This came to haunt me five years later at the tail end of the Cold War, when I was serving in Warsaw, only one hundred miles west of the Soviet border. By then, Michael had used his high school diploma to enlist in the Navy. He joined his father John Walker's spy ring and stole more than fifteen hundred classified documents detailing precisely how the U.S. planned to react to specific emergencies and exposing previously hidden vulnerabilities. If the Cold War had turned hot while I was in Poland, the Soviet Union would have had a tactical advantage. My interest in treason dates back to Michael.

Terror, First-Hand
I left Maine and my first marriage in 1981 and joined the Foreign Service of the United States, the overseas arm of the State Department. I volunteered to go to San Salvador and served in the American Embassy there, first as a vice-consul, later as the commercial officer. I danced with Navy Commander Al Schauffelberger at my thirty-fifth birthday party. Four days later a guerrilla terrorist blew Al's head off. My interest in counterterrorism starts with Al.

Poland and Denmark
From 1984-86, I was the personnel officer at our embassy in Poland. I met and married Mogens Pedersen, a Captain in the Royal Danish Army who was serving as assistant military attaché at the Danish embassy. We conceived our first child in Warsaw. I was four months pregnant when Chernobyl exploded and I went on maternity leave to Denmark for the next year. Our first son Per was born in Denmark.

Back in the USA (For a while)
In 1987 I returned to the U.S. to work in the State Department's Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs. Our second son Christian arrived in 1988. The next year I resigned from the Foreign Service; we moved to Oregon in 1990. Our daughter, Gretchen, joined us in 1991. In 2001, we returned to Denmark so our three kids could experience their Danish heritage.  All finished high school in Denmark and enrolled in Danish universities.

How I Got Started Writing

I took writing classes at the local community college and joined New Writers of the Purple Page in 1992. I placed a few stories in small-circulation magazines while I worked on longer pieces. I won the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference prize for genre novels in 1995 and the following year Avon Books bought my first two novels featuring Casey Collins: 12 DRUMMERS DRUMMING and NIGHT ON FIRE. In 2001, Time Warner published an electronic version of 12 DRUMMERS DRUMMING.  In 2012, I will release NIGHT ON FIRE and the third novel in that series, EAST PAST WARSAW, as a e-books.

What I'm Doing Now

Capturing life from my kids' viewpoints: Moving with my family to Denmark gave me story ideas in a different genre.  In 2009, I began writing about a pair of teens who relocate from America to Copenhagen.  “Little Condo in Copenhagen” was published in GOOD WORKS, an anthology by ex-pat women living in Denmark.  That piece was adapted, revised and retitled “Lydia Meets the Danes” and printed in A PIECE OF CAKE 8, a textbook for eight-graders learning English.  The completed novel takes Lydia and her older brother Toby through their first year in Denmark.  The working title is MOVE TO: 2100 COPENHAGEN.

Writing short stories:  A character from NIGHT ON FIRE captured my imagination.  I began writing short stories featuring basketball-playing FBI Agent Dawna Shepherd.   Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine has bought eleven of them.  The latest, “Dubstep,”  will appear in a 2012 issue.  They make an interesting collection.

Working on a pet project:  I never met fellow Oregonian Ken Kesey though my own path crossed his often.  The late author has fascinated me since I first read ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST.  My manuscript STEAL THIS MOVIE imagines that an independent company comes to Eugene to film Kesey's life story.  Like so many authors before me, I find it easier to write about home when I'm far away from it.