You’ve looked all over the vast expanse of the internet, and you’ve finally found me! Congratulations! Read the blog. Send me a message. Buy a book. Buy two.
If you found me by accident and were actually trying to find recipes for beer-batter fish, stick around anyway and let’s start with a little thing called a bio:
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In the early 1980s, I pursued a writing degree from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa. I kept pursuing it for a while, but to this day it still eludes me.
I’ve since worked behind the scenes in publishing as a proofreader, copy editor, and typesetter. I’ve worked with publishers such as Carroll & Graf, Shoemaker & Hoard, Crown & Covenant Publications, Christian Publications (a.k.a. WingSpread/Zur), Pegasus Books, and F+W Publications. I also proofread author manuscripts being prepped for submission to agents and editors.
I’m on the board of the St. Davids Christian Writers’ Association. I also serve as author liaison for the Beaver County BookFest. Don’t let this list of stuff fool you, though. I’m not really all that busy. That’s partly because I don’t clean my house all that often.
Several chapters of my very first novel, Gray Area, won awards at the St. Davids conference. The entire novel placed as a semifinalist in the national contest Operation First Novel in 2004. My second novel, Do-It-Yourself Widow, fared even better. The opening chapter placed first at St. Davids in 2005, and the entire novel placed as a top-four runner-up in the Operation First Book contest in 2006.
In recent years, my short humor essays have garnered numerous awards—from a national contest on BrassRing.com to the Hall of Fame at the St. Davids Writers’ Conference.
My favorite writing challenge, though, has been the yearly contest known as National Novel Writing Month: writing 50,000 words of a single new fiction project during the month of November. I love the pressure of a ridiculous, forced deadline. I’m currently tinkering with several of these crazy manuscripts, trying to beat them into submission so I can send them out into the world.
I also enjoy “Weird Al” Yankovic music, computer gadgets, movies, crocheting, reading (because it’s obvious I’m an adrenaline junkie), and entertaining my office guinea pigs—Frid, Carl, and Steve—who keep me company while I’m working. I live in western Pennsylvania with my long-suffering engineer husband, Wayne Parker. We have six children between us, all of them now grown and living their own stories. We just upgraded ourselves to grandparent status in June 2018 with the arrival of baby Arthur (that’s “King Arthur” to you!). This has convinced me that life really doesn’t get any better than this.
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TL;DR: I enjoy typewriters, tech gadgets, crocheting, air conditioning, cats, guinea pigs, semi-tame squirrels, meandering around Sam’s Club looking for huge vats of salsa, and anything else that lends a grand sense of bold adventure to my life.
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Be on the lookout soon for these upcoming novels:
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Linda M. Au 