Judith B. Glad

Although I grew up in Idaho, I now live in Portland, Oregon It's a great place to write, because the rainy season lasts for eight months, a perfect excuse to stay indoors and tell stories. Flowers bloom in the Gladhaus garden every month of the year and snow usually stays on the mountains where it belongs. I have four children, two granddaughters, one grandson, and a husband who supposedly retired a couple of years ago, but still goes in to work now and then.

I've led an interesting life, with jobs varying from fry cook to Coca-Cola bottler, with assorted detours in- between. For a while, a long time ago, I wrote Science Fiction short stories, but the stories kept getting rejected as too romantic. They all had happy endings. Discouraged after a couple of hundred rejections, I swore I'd never write fiction again. So I went back to school and became a botanist, about the only profession in which I could be paid to tramp around the desert and the woods, picking flowers.

After graduate school, I became an environmental consultant and found that I was writing or editing about half the time: technical reports, proposals, and papers for botanical journals. Of course, all that awoke the old yearning to write a book.