I’m a talker.  Yeah.  It’s true.  A real yacker.  But the one thing I don’t like to talk about is myself.  How strange for a writer, yes?  But it’s true.  So when it comes to moi… I guess I’ll run down the basics.  If you want to know more — just ask! 

Ok, first, I’m a true Southern Belle.  And yes, phonetically, that’s:

Ahm-a trooo Suhthan Bail. 

 *insert scene with me batting my lashes and Rhett Butler sweeping me up the staircase annnnnnd……cut!* 

 I was born in Louisiana and, after a couple of ill-planned moves out of the state, I hurried back home and convinced my husband to live here as well.  Oh the power I wield…. No kids for us (personal choice – even tho my Dh and I love kids — as long as we can hand them back)    We are, however, proud parents of four-legged furbabies (unless you count Molly, our first “fur baby”, our black lab-mix who we lost in 2008 to bone cancer, but bought her an extra year when she lost her front leg).  So, we have been parents to both 3- and 4-legged babies.    Currently, we have 3 dogs… Old man Cody (14), Zoe (4) and Bailey (3).

I’ve been writing since I was in my twenties — so about a year ago… HA!  Oh, how I wish!  No… more like twenty years I’ve been AT writing…. so I started when I was a year old.  HA AGAIN!   Let’s just say I was early-20′s when I started ACTIVELY trying to pen my first novel.  Didn’t happen.  I landed a big NY Agent who was a former editor of one of the BIG houses, and she got an editor at Silhouette interested in my story.  Sadly, my agent worked at the pace of a snail and took off to the Catsklills for every single Jewish holiday.  This was long before cell phones and she couldn’t be reached there.  When I finally got word of changes I needed to make immediately in order to sell the story, I rushed through the changes and sent them back to my agent, who as an ex-editor told me it was necessary for her to RE-edit everything.  It took three months for her to send the revisions back to me, I worked on them day and night and sent them back within weeks only to have her wait three more months to send it on to the editor and guess what…. (drum roll)… the editor had already left the house. 

The next editor who got hold of my manuscript hated it. 

Ahh such is the life.  But that was so many years ago when the Romance writing industry was just beginning to explode.  I don’t think there are many agents out there anymore who could survive doing business the way my ex-agent did.  Needless to say, I haven’t actively looked for an agent since she burned my butter years ago.  *Shellshock!* And no… she is no longer in business.

I wound up shelving that story and giving up on my dream for many years.  I started back writing seriously in 2000.  In 2003 I took a couple of First Place honors in various RWA-sponsored contests and had an editor asking to see the full story.  Then, my brother passed away suddenly and my whole family was devastated.  I finally crawled back to the keyboard and tried again in 2005, revising an older story and selling it to a small publisher in 2007. 

Currently, I’m working on a sequel to that story (Reason to Believe) as well as a sci-fi  and a Young Adult novel.  When I’m not writing, I work at the local public library.