Throughout my life, I have loved books. From the time I could pick a toy out of a toy box, books was my favorite toy. Even that young, I knew the power and the magic that the written word brought to the world. When I was 7, my mother introduced me to chapter books, the first being “Tales of the Fourth Grade Nothing.” by Judy Blume. I felt like in an instant, I had the secrets of the world at my fingertips. I loved reading so much, I wondered if there was joy on the other side of the work, in the creation. Throughout school, my favorite companion was always a spiral notebook where I could write whatever book was going through my head at the moment. To this day, opening a brand new spiral notebook still gives me a giddyness of the possibilities of the pages.

I married in high school at 18 to a man that was leaving for basic training in the Army the next month. It was to a man I had known for a couple of years and was only a year older than me and we started a 13 year journey together, traveling to Missouri, Germany, and finally Oklahoma. Oklahoma was the last stop for us as a couple and I moved back to my hometown, even renting an apartment only 5 blocks from the house I grew up in. Throughout the marriage and my new singledom, I was a huge fan of true crime. I read my first true crime book, “The Wood Chipper Murder,” and was immediately hooked. Once I started college in 93, I was a psychology and criminal justice major. I loved not only reading about the true crime, I wanted to know what drove people to commit such henious acts against each other. Due to military moves, my education stopped after three years, in 1996.

After 13 years of the single life, and the realization that I met my wife. My wife travels every year to two years for work and that was how we met. She had just moved barely within my search parameters on a popular dating site. From the first conversation, there was never anyone else for either one of us. When, during a work trip, I saw a sign for a remote college offering not only BA’s in Creative Writing, but also MFA’s in Creative Writing, I jumped at the chance. I knew I was but a mound of clay that needed an artist to help me become the vessel that allows writing to flow from my fingertips. That is what brings us here.

On long road trips, I let my mind wander and occassionally, I hit gold. That is what happened during an eight hour trip at Christmas time 2021, where my idea hit me. This idea is now a planned book series, entitiled “Avenging Angies.” The series name is a play on the term, Avenging Angels, but has the same spirit in the words. In the first book, subtitled “Angie’s Story,” we meet Mia, a loner, living with her cat Khalua, when she gets a mysterious voice mail from her college roommate, Angie, who she hasn’t seen or spoke to since shortly after college graduation. Angie asks Mia to travel back to Delaware, retrieve a letter she has written, and has given her no further details. Mia does as asked, as Angie helped her through a trauma during college. When Mia goes to retrieve the letter, she learns that Angie has perished. When Mia opens and reads the letter, her solitary life is forever changed and Mia is willing to sacrifice her body and her sanity to make sure that Angie’s death was not in vain and that the person resposible pays, no matterr how law enforecement thinks this is a closed case. Throughout her journey, she is assisted in various ways by three equally strong women, Detective Grace Joilliette, Sister Mary Louise, and Gina, a house cleaner turned friend that not only keeps her house and cat safe, also keeps Mia’s sanity safe.

This year, I will be turning 50. I remember my grandmother turning 50 and it makes me realize just how old I am. Time is a thief, it sneaks away the preciousness of life, abd when someone is taken from us too young, especially at someone’s hands, we want to take action. This series I hope will be an empowering book for females. Although most of the men in the pages of this series will be deranged men who love to be superior to the women in their life, this is only a small percentage of men in the world. Unfortunately the evil among them tend to outshadow the good.

I hope you will come back and learn more about me, my writing process, and the interesting turns in the book. And there will be samples to entice you even more.

Jessie