FAQS Answers to some frequently  asked questions about me. PERSONAL QUESTIONS When and where were you born? I was born on July 21st in Concord California. It was a medium-sized town, back then at least, in northern California. Where did you grow up? I grew up in Concord. Most of the time my mom and I lived with my grandmother. I graduated from Mt. Diablo High School, class of 1976. (That’s a big hint if you are trying to figure out how old I am.) I went to the same high school that my mother and grandmother attended. Did you have any brothers or sisters? No, I was an only child. Where do you live now? I live in San Jose, California, the heart of the Silicon Valley. Do you have a family? I am married to Erik Giberson. I have a grown son, Ryan and a grown daughter, Jennifer. I also have a grandson, Connor. Did you go to college? Not right out of high school. I didn’t go to college until I was 35 and I had already published several books. I have a BS in Business Management.   What kind of pets do you have? I am a big pet lover. Right now I only have one dog, Chelsie, a border collie mix. Over the years our family has had dogs, cats, horses, ponies, rats, guinea pigs, birds, hamsters and a turtle. What kind of jobs did you have you were a kid? My first job was cleaning house for my skating instructor in exchange for lessons. I also worked as a cashier at Woolworth's Drug Store. I had to take a math test and prove I could do math in my head. In high school I worked at a burger place called Bob’s Burgers. What do you like to do in your spare time? Read, read, and read. Work in my California Native Plant garden. Play with my dog. Go to Santa Cruz, wander around the used bookstores and then sit in one of my favorite restaurants, The Crepe Place, drinking chai and reading. Tell me something weird about you. One of my favorite comfort foods is leftover from childhood. A sandwich made with soft, white Wonderbread, creamy Jif peanut butter, and slices of Del Monte sweet pickles. Mmmm, good. MY WRITING LIFE When do you work? I’m working all the time. Just thinking is working if I am trying to work out a plot problem. My regular writing time though is in the late afternoon, after I get home from work and most of the weekend but I make notes to myself throughout the day. Where do you work? Well I have an office but I have yet to actually write in it. I have two desks in there and they are both covered with papers and books. I’ve got six tall bookcases in the office and 4 drawer file cabinets. But for some reason I write in the living room with my laptop on my lap. What was the first book you ever wrote? I wrote my first book when I was thirteen-years-old. It was called A Slice of Life in Bite-Sized Pieces and was a collection of my poems. Thankfully, it was never published. Did you always want to be a writer? I don’t know. I never really understood that you could be “just” a writer and not anything else. I thought you had a regular job and then wrote on the side. As soon as I figured out that it was okay to be a fulltime writer it was all I wanted to do. It still is. Where do you get your ideas? Ideas find me. Sometimes I’ll read something and not even realize that an idea has burrowed into my brain. It might not pop up for weeks or months or even years. Then one day I can be eating breakfast and BOOM, the idea will jump out and say, “Write about ME!”