I have an identical twin sister. Actually we’re called mirror image twins because I’m right handed and she’s left handed. We used to play tricks on people, switch classes and dates and no one ever knew!
Rita Herron, Hidden Bones
My sister and I were born in a mental hospital. At the time it was called Milledgeville State Hospital but years before was known at the State Insane Asylum. Growing up, when people asked why we were born at the mental hospital, my mother said our father worked there. He was a mechanic so over the years we were perplexed by her comment. Then we made up much more interesting stories about which one of our parents might have been crazy and committed!
That hospital has been the inspiration for some of my books and for characters’ psychiatric problems. Ironically, my sister is a counselor now and has worked at a mental hospital and a prison!
My twin and I graduated co-valedictorians yet were overlooked for scholarships. That night instead of celebrating like the other students we cried because my family was so poor they couldn’t afford to send us to college. Except for my brother, no one in our extended family had ever attended college, and at that time, my parents didn’t think girls needed to further their education – that was reserved for boys.
So my mother lined up jobs for us at the local sewing factory (sweatshop) where she worked. During summers I worked there and sewed side seams on long wool pants for eight hours a day in an non-airconditioned building. Looking around, I saw myself still sewing those side seams when I was middle aged and older as some of the other women were. While doing the monotonous work each day, I fantasied about a different life. So the day after graduation, my sister and I visited the school counselor, took out loans and paid our way through college.
Reading as a child was an escape for me – I was obsessed with the Trixie Belden series. So I decided I wanted to be a writer and handwrote a 112 page mystery. But my family laughed at that, so in college I decided to get a degree in Early Childhood Education. There began my career as a kindergarten teacher. I was also known as The Bag Lady because I visited schools, libraries and bookstores with a bag of props to perform stories as a professional storyteller. Through storytelling with children and teaching them to write their stories, my urge to write was reborn and I decided to pursue it. My first attempt was about a mystery about group of boys who collected baseball cards that got stolen. It’s basking in a drawer somewhere and has been for years!
Before writing romance, romantic suspense, and crime thrillers, I wrote nine books for Francine Pascal’s Sweet Valley Kids series and a nonfiction book called Surviving Summers With Kids because I had to figure out what to do with my own young children during the summer. My son had a habit of saying, “I’m Bored” and wanting to be entertained so I created a jar labeled the Bored Jar. In it, I wrote different things he could do and also made him write some of his own suggestions. Some were fun, some educationally related and others were chores. Each idea was on a different piece of paper so he had no idea what he’d draw when he chose one. After a few times of finding a chore listed, the habit was broken.
My hobby – ironically, other than reading, was sewing! I come from a long line of quilters where my mom and aunts gathered to tell stories and quilt together. While I found the actual hand quilting part tedious, I had a flair for creativity and enjoy piecing the different fabrics to create a design.
I have a secret obsession with buying legal pads. When I look at all those blank pages, I get tingly just thinking about filling them with different story ideas. The possibilities are endless.