I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, in a small but diverse neighborhood sandwiched in between Prospect Park and Greenwood Cemetery.  Living in the shadow of an ancient cemetery in a house that had a creepy basement and four older brothers who routinely scared the crackers out of me, I learned at an early age the power of the imagination.  In the confines of my Brooklyn home, I invented characters that would both entertain and protect me from  the bogeymen that surely prowled through the late night hours.  It's a habit that never faded.

We moved out of Brooklyn when I was 16 years old, trading our city life for rural country living in upstate Pennsylvania. Those characters of mine carried me through some tough  transitional years and beyond. 

I've always loved writing.  In fact I wrote my first "book" in 2nd grade ("Speedy the Mouse"--fully illustrated).  Still, I never made the connection between my writing and my invented characters.  Duh.  It wasn't until I graduated college (the University of Scranton), and was halfway through law school at Syracuse University, that I realized those characters who inhabited my mind would be much happier on a sheet of paper.  Thus, a writer was born.  Of course, by that time, I'd already committed myself to the legal profession.  But after 17 years of practicing law, and relegating my writing ambitions to the realm of "hobby,"  I quit law, freeing myself to pursue writing full time.  After all, who needs to eat?  Still, those characters of mine never gave up on me, and eventually found their way from pen to paper. 

In the meantime, I somehow found the time to get married (to a man I "imagined" into existence, by the way), have two astounding kids, move from Pennsylvania to Florida to New Jersey, and adopt a menagerie of animals (somewhere along the lines I've cared for a variety of dogs, a couple of cats, a pair of parakeets, too many fish to count, a turtle or two, a bearded dragon, and a hamster).  I love animals because they so readily follow me into the intriguing dimensions where I spend my days behind what others see as just a plain office door.

Since escaping from the prison of legal practice, I've worked as a literary agent, a ghostwriter, an editor, a secretary, a substitute teacher, and a receptionist.  But when people ask me what I do, I tell them the truth--I'm a writer. 

I hope you will take the time to meet just a few of the characters who have kept me company over these many years.  You'll find some of them in my novel, TURN OF THE SENTRY.