Connie worked for many years as a radio reporter and news anchor, with a couple of brief forays into TV news along the way. Her experience as a journalist shows up in some of her novels. She also dabbled in acting in college and community theater. She uses those experiences in some of her books as well.

Her novels are fast-paced stories featuring young women facing serious challenges set against the backdrop of some thorny issues. She writes time travel, magical realism, historical fiction and climate fiction – all with a dollop of romance.​

Bill: Connie, how and why did you become a writer, and can you tell us about your creative process?

Connie: When I was in 5^th grade, I read The Little House series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I decided I should be a writer too. I started with my biography. After filling a page and a half, I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Ha!  I transitioned into writing angsty, teenaged poetry, then switched to short stories at 15, tried writing children’s books, YA novels, and eventually settled on writing adult novels. My creative process involves channeling my concerns about a variety of issues, including social injustice, personal failures and climate change. To shine a light on a topic, I use it as a backdrop for my story. Racial injustice is featured in several of my books—A Daffodil for Angie (Young Adult) The Time Capsule,and The Going Back Portal. Then I work on building a main character to inhabit that world. I get to know her first, then outline a story arc for her. That changes sometimes as she interacts with other characters. But I always know how the story will end before I begin writing. My first draft always stinks. It’s messy, inconsistent and redundant. I go through many, many re-writes. The revision process always generates better ideas for scenes, and in my forthcoming novel, created a different ending. That’s the first time that’s happened.

Bill: Time travel figures in several of your novels, but not in a science fiction kind of way. Talk about that.

Connie: I’ve always liked time travel stories. Ideas pop into my mind. The Time Telephone grew out of this exact thought: what if you could call someone in the past on a time telephone? The novel also grew out of a situation within my extended family where a parent abandoned their child. So I combined the two—writing about a teenage girl grieving her mother’s death, lamenting the fact that even when her mother was alive, they never had a real mother-daughter relationship. There’s that element of fantasy, but it also deals with the very real-world issue of child abandonment. In The Going Back Portal, a young woman’s grandmother appears to be descending into Alzheimer’s disease, talking about a Cherokee Indian woman living in the woods behind her country cottage. But it turns out there’s actually a time gate that leads the protagonist to 1840 where a Cherokee woman is struggling to survive the brute who’s taken control of her land and her life. The novel delves into the wrongs perpetrated against Native Americans. That’s what appeals to me – not the sci-fi type of time travel story.

Bill: Would you describe several other of your books?

Connie: My concern about climate change prompted me to write a trilogy set a hundred years in the future against a backdrop of runaway global warming. I wanted the story to be romantic and exciting. So I mixed all of that together to produce The Shade Ring Trilogy—The Shade Ring, Albedo Effect, and Aerosol Sky. My novel, VisionSight,        is about a young woman who can see the future, including the unexpected challenges that “gift” brings. The novel I’m publishing this fall is another time travel story. This one is set in the 1850s and features a suffragette living with an abolitionist family in the Philadelphia area.

Bill: You just finished producing your own audiobook version of The Time Capsule. What was that like for you?

Connie: In a word: EXHAUSTING! I worked in radio news for many years. With all my experience in front of the mic and my experience editing, I foolishly thought “How hard can it be?” I was humbled by how hard it can be. Delivering the news is nothing like narrating a novel. There are character voices to do. Even if you don’t want to get too carried away, you still have to differentiate between characters. Of course, the sheer length of the novel is a big factor. The audiobook version of The Time Capsule is 9 hours and 21 minutes! Agh! Then there’s mouth noise to deal with. Multiple takes of every paragraph to hopefully get a usable take, often editing a sentence from one take into another paragraph take. The editing was a fulltime job. And don’t forget the technical issues, including hiss and extraneous noises (airplanes flying overhead,

barking dogs, etc.) I had to get up at 4:00 a.m., go down to the basement to my makeshift recording booth so I could record for a couple of hours before all the noise started. Will I ever do another audiobook? I’m still pondering that question.

Bill: What advice would you give to other indie authors?

Connie: There are lots of blog posts and newsletters out there with specific advice on publishing, plotting, character development, pacing, etc. I don’t want to get into all of that. I think a good piece of advice is to read a lot. Read the kinds of books you want to write. Notice what the good authors do—how they transition, how they handle dialog, how they develop character. Think about those things when you notice them and imagine how you might adapt those techniques in your own writing. It can also be educational to read poorly written books, although not as enjoyable. In that case, you might notice things you, yourself, never want to do—like using a character’s name

over and over and over and over when he/she, him/her would be better.

Thanks for having me, Bill. BTW—here’s my website.

A note to my readers: My interview with Connie first appeared in my October Newsletter. If you haven’t subscribed yet, here’s the link. I promise it’s spam-free, and I will not clutter your inbox!