Karen lives with her Timelord husband and two teens in Timelord training. The oldest Timelord child has flown out of the nest and is busy rescuing the world as she captures it's beauty in her wonderful photographs. Karen also lives with a hyper and curious kitten who survived being born in a flood, no wonder she plays in water, silly Kitten!
Karen has been writing since the age of eight, not miraculous for her species, but not bad either. She began devising stories at the age of five to exhaust her imagination so she could get to sleep at night, which sounds like an oxymoron but it was her salvation. She shelved her musings in her late teens and spent decades writing non-fiction, which she adored. During this time she heard screaming from the basement but when she investigated all was in place so she turned a deaf ear and just to be on the safe side, she locked the door.
In January of 2009 she had an epiphany when she read a best-selling novel a friend suggested and noticed things that shouldn't be in there, like incomplete sentences and dangling participles. Instead of sending hate mail to the publisher, she turned a little crafty hoping that surely she could fill the gap, smiling wickedly and donning her rather dusty fiction hat. She noticed the cries of agony stopped in the lower level and now "they" were talking, whispering and scratching at the door...
Suddenly the world was at Karen's fingertips, literally, and she began four novels and a devotional book (she's started three more novels since). She made chocolate cake and brought ice cream hoping to make amends to the basement clan finally understanding who they really are. The characters had a party when she let them out into the kitchen and she dutifully apologized to them all. They forgave her, gasping for fresh air while she tearfully begged them to stay and now they mill about her townhouse when she's not at home and when she is at home, they tell her the craziest things you've ever heard that somehow make sense to everyone else and even entertain them.
She heard vaguely somewhere there was a writing program called NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month and she decided to give it a whirl incorporating it into her middle grade and high school classsoom in November of 2009. That novel is now under contract with MuseItUp Publishing and will release in April 2011.
Sometimes life changes course on you very unexpectedly, you never know what's around the corner...
Beware the basement...
