About Me & the Potomac Shores

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Hi, readers! I’m so glad you’re here visiting my website. As you may have discovered by now, my first novel is immersed in the places I live and love, from the Potomac and Occoquan Rivers in Northern Virginia to the shores of South Florida’s Intracoastal Waterway.

When I’m not making up stories about Katie and Deke and their boating adventures, I’m a professional marketing and technology copywriter. I’ve published travel articles as a contributing editor for National Geographic Traveler magazine and children’s nonfiction as a senior editor for National Geographic World magazine. I’m active in writers’ groups and serve as vice president of the Northern Virginia Writers Club. I graduated from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, with an English degree and am completing an MFA in fiction writing at Lindenwood University.

Since high school English class, I have wanted to be a “paperback writer,” but I didn’t think I had a story to tell, so I built a career out of nonfiction writing and a passion for the power of technology. Then, like my heroine Katie, the great pause of the global pandemic helped me hear my own voice again. I realized that the characters in a novel can live our shared experiences and give us insight into our motivations: the choices, reactions, and missteps that make up a life.

While The Cicada Spring can be defined as a love story, it is really a life story wrapped up in the loves we surround ourselves with…family, friends, pets, work, our natural world, and with any luck, a devoted First Mate. I set out to write a coming-of-middle-age story focused on that halftime period in our lives when our children are starting to lead their own lives, our careers are maturing, and our parents are aging, or even gone. It’s a time when we are faced with the sum of our decisions in the first half and wonder whether the next half is going to bring us both the sustenance and fulfillment of a life well lived…and well loved.

You’ll find many novels set on the Chesapeake Bay, the marshes of the Carolina Lowcountry, even the Great Lakes, so why not the Potomac, the river that has run through our nation’s history, and my own, from the beginning? Although the setting is fictitious, the surroundings are very much real places you can explore on foot or by water along the Potomac River and its tributaries.

My heroine Katie traces the footsteps of native Americans and our Founding Fathers from the helm of an old Boston Whaler, docking in the historic mill town of Occoquan and exploring riverbanks for ancient shark teeth and arrowheads. When your whole world is falling apart—even in the middle of a global pandemic—a boat can take you to a different world where you can soothe your soul in the tranquility of water and wildlife.

If you’ve ever felt that your life was off course or you took the wrong fork in the road and your own dreams have gotten lost along the way, the themes of survival, reflection, and transformation in The Cicada Spring will resonate with you. If you seek the solace of nature, you will enjoy immersing yourself in the Potomac Shores.

Writing The Cicada Spring has been a great opportunity to create a world in which my characters are immersed in many of the interests and places that I love. My experiences as a boater on the Potomac and in south Florida have helped to shape my narrative. In fact, Bonnie Brae is a real plot of land where my parents had planned to build their retirement home, with grand views of Belmont Bay. After they passed away, I found the blueprints for the house, the same house that is the focal point of The Cicada Spring.

Outside of freelance writing, property management, and water-related activities, I enjoy trading audiobooks with my daughter, spoiling Brigid and the real “Hawaiians” (RIP sweet Maui), collecting unique bird houses and chimes, and traveling. I’m fascinated by the natural world and human culture and seek to travel as much as I can to experience both. I’m married to a fascinatingly nerdy behavioral neuroscientist and divide my time between homes in Northern Virginia and on the Intracoastal Waterway near West Palm Beach, Florida.