I am a native Californian, a baby boomer who grew up in a very idyllic place at a very idyllic time--on the coast of Southern California in the 60's, although I spent many childhood summers before that on my grandparents' farm in Texas. So I'm a West Coast girl raised by Southern parents, who grew up in a place where you spent your free time playing volleyball on the beach and weekends dancing to local bands like Beach Boys and the Righteous Brothers.My husband and I met in high school, and I never knew I wanted to be a writer until I was in my thirties and back in college again. I had been an art major the first time around--it was the 60's--quit to make some kind of mark in the world, but I got married instead.My love of history and reading and art all came together for me when I quit school again, after working toward my history degree and then becoming a mother--something we were told couldn't happen. (The child not the degree.) So with the miracle gift of my daughter, came a new career for me. I knew then I wanted to write a book, had an idea and more importantly a vision of the kind of stories I wanted to tell. I told myself I could always go back to school. Funny thing the way life works. Almost two years to the day I quit school, I sold my first book on 50 pages to Pocket Books, a division of Simon and Schuster. That was over 22 years ago and many books later. So the road I traveled to become an author had many twists and turns, joys and disappointments. Yet I'm doing something I really love. In so many ways I'm a very lucky woman.