I had two childhoods. One was as a kid in Germany, the other as a teen in California. Now, my husband and I live in Seattle, WA. I was passionate about reading and wanting to be a writer from early on. Growing up in post-WWII Germany, I wrote poetry and short stories, and I read everything I could get my hands on, no matter if it was the...
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I had two childhoods. One was as a kid in Germany, the other as a teen in California. Now, my husband and I live in Seattle, WA. I was passionate about reading and wanting to be a writer from early on. Growing up in post-WWII Germany, I wrote poetry and short stories, and I read everything I could get my hands on, no matter if it was the classics or dime-store novels. I learned to appreciate Schiller and Goethe, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and, finally, Shakespeare. He says it all! In college, I also discovered contemporary writers and learned to tell good from bad. I studied writing at California State University at Los Angeles, where I earned a B.A. My work experience began in Hollywood as press agent to big corporations and minor movie stars. After suffering major burnout, I tried my hand at teaching high school English, but it wasn’t for me. So I travelled and worked at too many jobs to count until I found a home in Seattle banking. I kept writing. I kept learning, attending workshops and writers' groups. Finally, I published my first novel, Irretrievably Broken, and now I'm a full-time writer. What a long road it's been!
Irretrievably Broken had many inspirations, but ultimately it was a newspaper clipping from my hometown in Germany. A neighboring property had been torn down and a mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath, was unearthed. Experts speculated that a synagogue would most likely be situated beneath the foundations of the house I had lived in as a child. I read the clipping and promptly forgot about it. Or so I thought! But this discovery must have been burned into my subconscious. I was almost finished with the novel when I rediscovered the clipping and realized how these facts had informed my writing. There, at the heart of a tale of adventure and travel, of love and loss, was a Holocaust story, come to light after years of concealment, very much like the mikvah that had been unearthed so many years later under our former neighbor's house in a small town where no one in post-WWII Germany ever spoke of such things.
My work experience in Seattle banking inspired my next novel, Confessions of a Predatory Lender. The year is 2006 and everyone knows you can make a killing in mortgage lending. Christy and Megan, two small-town girls from the Palouse region of Eastern Washington, arrive in Seattle with newly minted finance degrees and dollar signs in their eyes. Both are eager to grab their chance at becoming mortgage loan officers. If only they can pass the training class!
“Good girl” Christy is our guide through the maze of predatory lending with BFF Megan her ever-present and irreverent sidekick. Together they’re an irresistible combination as they love, shop, and lend their way through this hilarious novel toward an ending we’re all too familiar with.
I'm also in the process of publishing a series of stories about love, death, redemption, and hope as Kindle e-books. Eventually I will collect them into one book, called The Angel of Death.
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