About me

I am a media coordinator at a very large elementary school (1000+ students) in a small town outside Raleigh, NC. Prior to my job in the media center, I taught sixth or seventh grade social studies, language arts, and/or science for 12 years in 5 different school systems in NC. I was selected as my county's teacher of the year for my last year in the regular classroom. As a teacher, I coached Science Olympiad teams and the drama club. After all, there's just not enough "drama" in a middle school classroom! (And if you believe that, there's some ocean front property in Arizona I'd like to sell to you!) The drama club performed two plays that I wrote.

I have been writing for many years, although poetry was my genre when I was in elementary and high school. Although I still write poems, I moved into prose 7 years ago. My first novel is an adult suspense novel, The Curse of Josiah's Orchard, and I received some positive feedback from a publisher. However, the changes he suggested were overwhelming at the time so the novel has been pushed towards the bottom of a very long to-do list.

The writing bug had bitten me, however, and a slew of short stories, adult and child-oriented, sprang from my fingertips into my computer. In between raising three children, numerous soccer games and Scout meetings, teaching middle school, and earning my master's degree, I still found time to work on another adult suspense novel. I also entered and won a local writing contest. Then, after a very long day in the library, I found the beginning of a middle grades fantasy novel emerging from a conversation with my assistant. From that conversation, J.T. Middleton and his time-traveling librarian were born! I have completed the first two adventures of this average fourth grader, and I'm a third of the way through his third story.

Over the summer, I realized I really needed to put aside all anxiety and fear to write...the query letter! After unsuccessfully trying to find an agent for a few months, I joined SCBWI and realized that some reputable publishing houses still accept unsolicited manuscripts. I am now in the process of submitting the first adventure to those editors.