In many ways, my life has been a series of exciting launches. Of course, birth was the first. I was number three child in a family of six and grew up in a very secure atmosphere. Dad was never without a job, and Mom saw to it that the Depression and Dad's overly generous nature didn't rob us of a roof over our heads.

Chronologically, my next launch was at the age of eighteen when I left the States for Africa, crossing the ocean by ship, France by train, and the Mediterranean by means of a freighter. For the next seventeen years I worked as a member of a religious community. For ten of those years I lived in a place known back then as the Gold Coast and now called Ghana. I learned what it was like to live in fear of a government, but I also experienced the extraordinary pleasure of being made to feel at home in a foreign land.

In the seventies, I left the religious community and returned home to Michigan. Little did I know that another launch would come in the form of my little sister playing Cupid. She introduced me to her neighbor, Roy Schenkel, a widower with four children ages seven to thirteen. Roy and I married a year later, and for the next decade life was like riding out a storm on a ship with teens at the helm. Fortunately, they grew up, married, and gave us 8 grandchildren as a peace offering.

My last great launch, so far, and one that has made me into a kind of accidental author, happened when two events collided—a power outage and working under the dictatorship of the manager of a supermarket. The outage and its subsequent boredom handed me pen and paper, and my boss supplied the drive to write a mystery in which he starred as the victim. From that day until now, playing with words and clues has been right up there with oxygen and chocolate.