I am a retired high school administrator and former nurse who grew up in Flemington, a rural town in Hunterdon County, New Jersey. With a photographer father, I was always surrounded by cameras. My passion for farming, nature, gardening, and photography eventually led me to pursue these interests full-time upon retirement. My husband and I then relocated to our home in Chatham, MA on Cape Cod, where I opened a photography gallery and began creating items featuring my photographs for gift shops and museums.
In 2010 I retired again and turned my camera on the many antics of our pets. I never thought about writing a children’s book until I became inspired by a young child in our town that was diagnosed with neuroblastoma. To cheer her during her long hospital stays I took pen to paper and sorted through all the photos of our pets and thus the first book, “MAX and Annie Patches” was created. Feeling badly for her older sister, I wrote the second book, “Annie Patches, My New Forever Home” for her. Then I took a children’s book writing course in Florida over the winter and learned everything I had done wrong.
Back to the drawing board and over the next several years, wrote, rewrote and rearranged the photos to finally produce an acceptable children’s book for the 4–8-year-old as an early reader/read to book. I decided to self-publish and I did my own illustrations with my photographs and laid the pages out using Publisher, Photoshop and Word and then uploaded them to an online publisher.
Since the books started selling on Amazon and at my book signings where I take Annie with me in her crate, I found that the children and their parents wanted to take Annie home. Through a Google search I fond Aurora Toys and they were willing to work with me to create an 8” plush Annie to accompany the books. Now the children can have their own Annie to cuddle, and she doesn’t require any care, much to the joy of their parents.
Being an educator, I felt that there should be a lesson to learn from each story. If you click on the books page, you will see what each book teaches the reader.
The third, and as of now, the final book in the Annie Patches series, “Annie Patches the Snowbird Cat” is a chapter book and talks about Annie’s twice a year travels from Cape Cod to Naples, Florida with her housemates Baron & Bella. The lesson is the ability to adapt to new and changing environments and the necessary manners and behaviors needed to make for enjoyable family travel.
After a long hiatus from writing, my husband encouraged me to write a book about Chatham, MA on Cape Cod, our summer home and well-known tourist destination. This time I was very fortunate to connect with Wendy Ferhle Pape who illustrated the book entitled, “Discovering Chatham A-Z”. Mascot Books published it, and it has sold out of the first printing already. The second printing is available through this website and from me directly by email, phone or text.
My fifth book, The Adventures of Cape Cod Nature Boy has been two years in the making. It is a true story about a young boy I learned to know through his videos @Cape Cod Nature Boy. I thought the information would make a great children’s book. It was not until later I learned he was the son of my veterinarian. It is a small world after all.
My husband, Cam and I live with our four year old Golden Doodle, Brodie and Annie Patches the cat who is now 17 in Chapin, SC and still travel to our summer home in Chatham on the Cape every summer.