I love change. Yes, it’s a bit scary and it’s disruptive, but it’s also exhilarating and transforming. Also, it’s inevitable.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.