Who Am I?

It strikes me that I should have a more complete bio somewhere than just what's listed in the "About Me" thingie on my sidebar.  Something a little more specific, maybe.  Something that gives you an idea of where I'm coming from when I write all this stuff on my blog.  So here goes.

I'm a Christian.  A Lutheran, to be precise.  A conservative, confessional Lutheran, to be even more precise.  I belong to the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), though I was raised in the Lutheran Church -- Missouri Synod (LCMS).  I believe the Bible is the inspired, inerrant word of God.  You don't agree, take it up with Him.

I'm a wife.  Cowboy and I have been married since 2002, and mighty happily so.

I'm a mother of three.  I stay at home and homeschool them.  I was homeschooled myself, K-12, as a matter of fact.

I'm a writer.  I've been writing fiction for more than twenty years now, since I was fourteen and decided I didn't want to be a veterinarian after all.  I've been telling stories for as long as I can remember, though, and my parents have a couple of one-paragraph stories I typed up on Mom's old manual typewriter when I was six or seven.  I'm currently a columnist for the newspaper Prairie Times, and you can read all of my monthly columns from 2018 forward right here.

I won a contest from Rooglewood Press in 2016 with my Sleeping Beauty retelling, which is available in the anthology Five Magic Spindles. I have since independently published five books: Cloaked (2017), Dancing and Doughnuts (2018), One Bad Apple (2020), My Rock and My Refuge (2022), and The Man on the Buckskin Horse (2024).  You can learn more about them on this page.

My Rock and My Refuge was a finalist for the WILLA Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction and Nonfiction from Women Writing the West, and won second place in the 2023 Pencraft Awards for Literary Excellence for Christian Historical Fiction

I also have a book-oriented blog called The Edge of the Precipice that I invite you to visit!  And I'm on Instagram now, aren't I fancy?

I have a BA in Liberal Arts with concentrations (like minors) in English and History.

I love to read, write, watch movies, crochet, bake, cook, and play in the dirt.  I have yet to grow up.  But when I do grow up, I want to be a fairy godmother.

And I have a deep need to hug fictional characters.  Just so you know.