Like my father and his father, I was born in Providence, Rhode Island. If you follow different lines of ancestry, I'm both a first generation American, and an autochthon. That is, my mother was a Crown citizen until I was 14, and on my father's side, through the French Canadian line, we have unidentified Native American ties. Nowadays, I claim one grandfather's Hispanic background, but frankly, the family is "mixed plate."
When I was nine, the family relocated to San Pedro in Los Angeles, where I grew up. I made some wonderful friends there, but I always loathed LA itself, especially the smog. In my early twenties, I moved to southern Virginia, and spent several years around the Tidewater area, living in Nansemond and York counties. I can't recall how many times I visited Colonial Williamsburg, or showed visiting relatives around Yorktown. It's a lovely place with great folks, but too suburban-rural for me.
I had long said that my ideal home would be "someplace where the mountains come down to the sea, and right between is a city." By my third day in Honolulu, I knew I had finally found home. About a year after arriving, I visited my parents in Long Beach (CA) for about a week, found I still loathed the LA basin, and since then have rarely set foot off Oahu, and then only to go to the other islands. Predictions about my getting "rock fever" from not being able to travel for hundreds of miles in any direction were dead wrong: I now consider the trip across the mountains to Kailua something of a safari.
Shortly after settling in Honolulu, I began selling non-fiction articles, and continued sporadically until the idea for People's Names demanded I write it. Now, while I have some non-fiction ideas in the works, I tend more to fiction writing, as a way of expessing some of my historical research and the concepts it created.
Since 1980, I've lived with my best friend and husband, Pat, and a series of remarkable feline owners: currently Galadrial, who may ignore us for days on end, but when I'm writing seriously will be found next to my feet on the ottoman. Most of my reading is history, biography, archeology, and military history, at a rate of about 30,000 words an hour. When I can't stand to look at words on a page or a computer screen any longer, I work in 1:6 miniatures.
If there isn't music on in the background, no matter what I'm doing, I get a little twitchy. My tastes stay flexible, though right now it's heavy on soundtrack and New Age.
Somewhere around ninth grade I started getting too busy with life to watch much TV, and haven't owned one in many years. A few movies get added to the DVD collection every year (watched on a large monitor), but they may be anything from the latest to a Valentino silent. We're also collecting certain TV shows, from the Emma Peel Avengers to Buffy, now that so much is available.
Find out more about People's Names
