About Suzanne
Suzanne was born in Knob Noster, Missouri on an Air Force Base. She moved a lot and went to many different schools. The second oldest of five kids, she was raised single-handedly by a towering pillar of strength, her 5’2″ mother.
She loved the structure of school. In fifth grade, her teacher brought two books from home and said “I thought you might like to read these.” It was before enrichment programs. Maybe he was just trying to keep her quiet. She likes to think he recognized her blossoming love for the written word.
In sixth grade, Suzanne was removed from class and shoved into a janitor’s closet with four other students. Such were the inauspicious beginnings of her school’s “gifted” program. Each student was asked to write a story. These stories were later collected into an anthology in the school library. This was about the time her relatives and friends (still the same BFF) started asking her when she was going to write a bestseller and make them all rich.
Junior High and High School followed and for once, Suzanne was mostly in the same place. She gave her 8th Grade Graduation speech, thought Taming of the Shrew was funnier than SNL, copy edited both the school newspaper and year book, and went on to win many English awards. Along the way, she fell in love with big, fat, juicy novels that carried her away to imaginary worlds. She also read her mother’s Erica Jong and Jackie Collins novels. Her favorite paperback reads at the age of 12 were Jaws, The Shining, and The Thorn Birds.
Though she dreamed of marrying an Australian priest, Suzanne married her high school sweetheart instead. She spent a decade as a department head manager in the hotel industry, stayed home for a decade with her two children, and eventually overcame a math phobia to get her Associate Degree in English, with honors.
During all this time, she wrote stuff. Once in a blue moon, she submitted stuff to various outlets. Every now and then, this stuff got published, and she got paid! She would have written the stuff anyway but her family thought the checks were cool.
Overcoming the fear of math gave her some idea on how to overcome her other fears. She started thinking bigger. She wrote more stories, attended every class and workshop she could find or afford, went on retreats, and she wrote a novel. She wrote a second draft of her novel. She wrote a third draft of her novel. Wrote more stories and that’s pretty much how she spends her non-working time.
Suzanne feels like she’s found her home planet when she’s reading books, talking books, writing, or talking to other writers. Growing up, no one she knew wrote for a living or thought writing was a real thing serious people did. She started her blog to point the way for anyone else out there feeling the urge to write but not knowing where to start.
Now, she’s interviewing authors, reviewing books, editing her novel, and leaping out of bed at odd hours to jot down ideas for articles, blog posts, and more novels. Her family and friends are her biggest supporters. In her spare time, she Swiffers hair tumbleweeds from the hallway, begs the love of her life to kill spiders, sings karaoke* in the kitchen, and reads everything she can get her hands on.
*No one supports that, but she doesn’t care. She does it anyway.
This was seconded