Barbara J. Olexer. I am the principal writer (thus far the only writer) and founder of Joyous Publishing. If you want to know more about me, my bio is below. If you want to look at my books, they are on my website (www.joyouspub.com), on www.amazon.com , and available as ebooks on www.scribd.com. I am very proud to be a fourth-generation Oregonian. Although I was born in Klamath Falls, my parents' home was actually in Tulelake, California, about 5 miles over the state line. I am a true American mixture: my ancestry includes American Indian, Irish, Scotch, English, Dutch, French, Russian, and Polish components. I don't remember my father, as he and Mother were divorced when I was about a year old. Mother raised my older brother and me, working for the Southern Pacific Railroad. When I was nine we moved to Ashland, Oregon, a beautiful little milltown tucked at the foot of the Siskiyou Mountains. To me, coming from a farm town with a population of about 1500, Ashland was a city. When we had lived there about a year, Mother married again; about a year later we moved to Wetmore, Oregon.Wetmore was a logging camp, also known as Camp 5, and was owned by the Kinzua Corporation, which also owned the town of Kinzua, eleven miles away. The mill was in Kinzua but the logging operations centered in Camp 5. I loved living there, in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, one of the loveliest places on earth. There was a population of about 100 and we had a two-room school. I went to the 6th and 7th grades there. Then they discontinued it and bused us to Kinzua, where I attended the 8th grade. School was much less fun in Kinzua and it seemed like a lot of bus riding. I went to the Wheeler County High School my freshman and sophomore years. The high school was in Fossil, the county seat, and entailed about a 40-mile bus ride, roundtrip. In many ways, the years in Camp 5 were the happiest of my life and I treasure the friends I made and the memories. Illness in the family caused us to move from Camp 5 and I went to live with my widowed maternal grandmother on her farm just out of Tulelake. I finished high school there and was accepted at Oregon State, which was a college then but has now become a university. I packed and Gram drove me to Corvallis but once on campus I changed my mind and refused to matriculate. Instead I went to San Francisco for the summer and took a 3-month course in dental assisting. Not that I had the slightest interest in dentistry, but I had fallen in love and didn't want to be too long away from the object of my affections.San Francisco was wonderful. I had visited my aunt and uncle there with Gram many times but living there was truly an adventure. I was completely not streetwise in spite of my aunt's and uncle's best efforts. Luckily, nothing bad happened to me in the big city and I retain an affection for San Francisco that I extend to no other city.I worked for a couple of years, then married my first love (not counting Gene Autry and Rick Nelson) in a beautiful garden ceremony at his parents' home, just out of Malin, Oregon, about ten miles from Tulelake. My husband was a partner in a family-owned sawmill and I loved his parents and got along well with the other members of his family. I was very happy and took my responsibilities as housewife quite seriously. I cooked everything from scratch for the first two years - until I discovered that no one could tell the difference between home-cooked and packaged. I canned fruit and made jam and pickles. I made my own clothes and took care of the flower garden. I even tried to grow a vegetable garden a couple of times but my green thumb didn't seem to encompass food plants, only flowers.Six months after we were married, circumstances so arranged themselves that we became the foster parents of a sixteen-year-old son. Willie was and is everything a son should be. I am only 7 years older than he so it was quite an experience to attend parent-teacher meetings on his behalf. Two years later we built a house on a hill with a marvelous view of the Tulelake Basin and Mount Shasta. We built it with our own hands and lots of help from friends and relatives. It was a lovely home with a gorgeous flower garden and we had many happy times there. My daughter, Laurel Anne, was born before the house was completely finished and my son, Bryan Patrick, was born nearly 3 years later. I am delighted with and very proud of all three of my children.I've never been much of an athlete, being the one always chosen last in P.E. games, usually with an argument between the captains: you have to take her, I had her last time. That kind of thing. But my husband was an active kind of guy so we boated, dirt biked with Hondas, and snowmobiled. We camped and picnicked and traveled and had big fun with friends and relatives. Willie went off to college and worked his way through, emerging with a degree in law enforcement. Then he went to work at the sawmill, where he had worked during vacations all through school. He married Carol, his high school sweetheart, who had a teaching degree, and I got to be mother of the groom. A couple of years later we sold our house on the hill and moved to a huge, 2-story brick home on a farm. The farm years were mostly happy ones. We rented the ground out but I raised a few chickens and ducks and turkeys and pigs. The kids had horses and a sheep, a cat and a dog, and it was an ideal place for them to grow up. I was leader of the 4-H horse club, The Juniper Jockeys, and assistant leader of the 4-H archery club. I was also director of the 4-H summer camp a couple of times. Then my husband and I discovered that we were basically incompatible and after 15 years of marriage we got divorced. The divorce took 3 years to complete and tore us all loose from our moorings.During that time the sawmill went bankrupt, seriously disrupting not only the whole family but the families of everyone who worked there. It was a hard blow to the whole community. I was left with the farm and tried to operate it myself for a couple of years but I didn't have enough ground to make a living share-cropping or renting it so I sold it and moved to Klamath Falls. I had begun seriously to write and Library Research Associates published The Enslavement of the American Indian just before I left Malin. I tried writing screenplays but found it impossible to market them from southern Oregon. Except that I did place a film biography of the Modoc chieftain, Captain Jack, with Frontier Films. But it has never been produced. A Hollywood agent actually signed me up but dropped me after a few months, saying it was too hard with me in Oregon. Daunted but determined, I continued to write, working a bunch of part-time jobs simultaneously to support myself and the kids.On becoming an empty-nester, I decided to try my luck in southern California. Laurel was living in San Diego so I moved there, too. San Diego is a great place to vacation but no fun to live in if your salary barely covers necessities. Those were lean years. Eventually, I came to my senses and moved to North Hollywood. Things were somewhat better financially but I still couldn't connect with an agent. I have not yet connected with an agent. If you happen to be an agent and you'd like to see eight or ten great screenplays, let's talk.At that time, Willie was farming in the Malin area; Laurel was going to the San Francisco Academy of Art, from which she graduated with a degree in interior design; Bryan was in the Army, stationed in Alaska; and I was at a loose end, looking around to see what mischief I could get into. I met my present husband, who was living in Maryland, and we corresponded for six months or so. Then I decided that, since my screenwriting career wasn't materializing, I had nothing to lose by moving east. I found work at a bicycle advocacy association in Baltimore and a home with a group of young people in Randallstown. Now that was an experience! I lived in two group homes and had a great time with the kids on the strict understanding that I was not their mother. After a couple of years I quit the bicyclists, who are very nice folks but don't pay that well, and went to work for an accrediting body for teacher preparation units - the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education - in Washington, D.C. Inside the Beltway. The people I worked with are all interesting and my former boss is a very nice lady, as well. I even invited her to my wedding. I continued writing through all these changes, switching from screenplays to novels because I thought novels would be easier to market. In 2002, beginning to believe that agents would continue to prove elusive, my husband and I started Joyous Publishing. I retired from NCATE in the fall of 2007 and we moved back home to Oregon. The joy of being home is stupendous! I decided to settle near Bryan, my younger son, and we live about a mile apart and see one another often. Laurel is gone, she passed away in the fall of 2003. I suspect that I will never fully recover from losing her. Thank God I still have her brothers and my grandchildren. Willie is still farming, Carol has retired from teaching, and their only child, my eldest grandson, is embarking on life as an adult. Bryan drives a municipal bus in Portland, Oregon, and is a single dad. His older boy is out on his own now but I am helping home school the younger one. I can tell you with authority that 3,000 was too many miles between family members and nineteen was too many years of separation.Somewhere along the line I got interested in astrology. My birth sign is Gemini, my ascendant is Scorpio, and my moon is in Virgo. I have an affinity for Taurus and Scorpio people and get along well with Virgos and other Geminis. I find Aquarians hard to understand.My favorite authors are L.M. Montgomery, Mark Twain, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, David Frome, P.G. Wodehouse, Owen Wister, James Herriot, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Rex Stout, A.A. Milne, Bill Watterson, Patrick McManus, and Lawrence Block (only the Bernie Rhodenbarr series).Favorite singer/actors: Bing Crosby, Rick Nelson, Gene Autry, Sammy Davis, Jr., Ringo Starr, Dean Martin, Johnny Cash, Lena Horne, The Andrews Sisters, Pam Tillis, and Adam Ant.Favorite movie stars: Katharine Hepburn, Maureen O'Hara, Audrey Hepburn, Marjorie Main, Ginger Rogers, Shirley Temple, Hattie McDaniel, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Robert Mitchum, Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Clint Eastwood, Harold Lloyd, Stan Laurel, and Oliver Hardy.Favorite TV shows: The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The Hollywood Palace, Burns and Allen, The Jack Benny Show, Magnum, P.I., Diagnosis Murder, and NCIS.