About the author

Sarah Branson

I love change. Yes, it’s a bit scary and it’s disruptive, but it’s also exhilarating and transforming. Also, it’s inevitable.<br>&nbsp;<br>I grew up in a household where until I was in junior high, we moved every year or two. Why? There are two possible reasons: 1- my dad was simply born under a wandering star and liked to keep looking for the elusive “right spot” or 2- he was a spy and on the run.<br>&nbsp;<br>Either way, we bounced from Nebraska to Oregon to California to Alabama to New Mexico (or it may have been Arizona, I was in diapers, so the difference eluded me). My mother was a smart-as-a-whip, special education teacher and was delighted to go along for the ride even when that ride got a little rocky.<br>&nbsp;<br>Long car trips across the country with my sister in the back seat and no seatbelts was a normal summer for us, but one year, my folks decided that Australia was going to be our Shangri-la. So, all the worldly goods were sold or packed, the cat was rehomed, and we headed to Long Beach, California to board a freighter to take us to Australia.<br>&nbsp;<br>The captain of the freighter, a native Aussie, who became known to me as Uncle Fred, decided I looked like his grown daughter as a child and this likeness meant I got to spend my days inspecting the ship with him and listening to him spin tales. That was when pirate stories first started to dance in my head.<br>&nbsp;<br>As an adult, I still embrace change. My career as a midwife taught me to move with the flow of birth and that families, women and birthing people are amazingly strong and remarkably resilient. I have worked in hospital settings, a birth center, and run my own homebirth practice. I have practiced midwifery for close to thirty years with forays into teaching science, English and history in the US and in Brazil and Japan. And now I have reinvented myself again, with all these lifetime experiences to guide me, as a writer of stories of action, adventure, revenge, and romance. Oh, and pirates.