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More than you wanted to know

I am a third generation native Northern Californian. At 17, with my vast experience of the working world, it was my opinion that standard teaching was too easy a career. I wanted a challenge, so  teaching autistic children became my target. After finding few college programs in the 1970s that offered courses dealing with autism and many people who thought I was saying "artistic" and kept steering me toward art colleges, I decided to get a degree in Special Education.

 I taught in both Nevada and California for seven years as a Special Day Class teacher at the middle school level before deciding that maybe teaching in a regular classroom might be challenging too. Sixteen years later,  because I didn't want to die in my 80s or 90s having only tried one career, I stopped teaching before  the scent of retirement could grow too enticing. I  worked as a certified massage therapist, a corporate trainer for a large health insurance provider, and a reporter and columnist for California's oldest continuously operating newspaper. It's been  a downhill slide on the salary scale, but, except for corporate training, an  increase on the fun scale.

In 2004, my husband and I both decided to stop doing what we were doing and do something else. It wasn't retirement, but we wanted to look around and see what might be available besides 10-12 hour workdays. We acquired our first dog, a wire-haired Fox terrier we named Sadie, who quickly took over our house and our lives. Between Sadie's feedings and training, I fit in a part-time job as a reporter at the Mountain Democrat, a job with never-ending variety. I thought it was a good way to flex my daily writing muscle and  have some fun.  It has been all of that and I have won  six awards from the  California Newspapers Publishers Association  for my  column--three  first place awards, two second place award and  a certificate of General Excellence. 
 
In 2010,  I wrote a  privately published  biography for Ossie Scariot, a local success story, and in  2012, I finished my first novel. I made the  decision to self-publish , just to see if I could.  I could and did, learning more about how books are  put together--more than I ever really wanted to know. "In the Pocket of  Dreams "  was published on  Kindle in 2013 and  in paperback  form  through CreateSpace in 2014. 

 I recently finished the final edits on my second novel, "Flight of the Red Dragonfly" and have decided to try the traditional route to publishing this time. A great literary agent is on my wish list.


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