Welcome to my Website and Blog…

Once upon a time, I started a blog. I quickly realized the wee thing required a lot of care and feeding, much like my desert vegetable garden, with which I constantly wage battle and which I often refer to as Moriarty. Like my tomatoes facing the scorching summer sun, my little blog crumbled to dust.

Still, since I am an author, I am expected to blog. Following some research into the art – I am a former reporter, after all, so researching brings me comfort – I am ready to try again.

The first step, I read, is to introduce yourself. And now, I will.

My name is Anne, though most people call me Annie, which seems to suit me better. Red hair. Freckles. Hard to argue with that.

While this site is dedicated to my writing, primarily my role as an author, I have worn many other hats. Over the course of my life, I’ve worked as a maid – nothing like cleaning other people’s toilets to keep one humble – a waitress, a bartender, and an amateur sports official in football, baseball, ice hockey, soccer, and basketball, the last two in which I was especially awful. I’ve also worked as a TV sports reporter and anchor at five stations, at both the local and national levels. Then, one day, when I was approaching forty, I became too old to do my job. Yes, those of us who ply our trade in front of a camera, especially those of us who are women, have a definite shelf life stamped on our foreheads. Mine had expired.

The next few years I spent a great deal of time feeling sorry for me, not wanting to run into anyone I knew from my television days, lest they ask me what I was doing. Unfortunately, no one seemed the least bit interested in hiring an out-of-work female sportscaster – though, for a brief moment, I considered an offer to become a temp on the Revlon assembly line, à la Lucy with her bonbons. Instead, I brushed off my old baseball gear and pulled out my football stripes and whistle, and spent my days and nights officiating youth and adult sports leagues.

My big break came when I begged a dubious editor at a small local newspaper to hire me on as a part-time sportswriter for seven bucks an hour. And a funny thing happened. My stories kept appearing on the front page. Turns out I wasn’t a bad writer. While I’d spent years writing for television, the concept that I could pen print stories seemed rather farfetched, especially since I rarely read books growing up and have always suffered from low-end dyslexia. As my best friend from high school so succinctly said when she discovered I’d written a book, “How the hell did you become an author?”

Today, like many authors, I still wear a number of hats. I am a high school journalism teacher in a Title I school in Phoenix, and am one of those lucky folks who loves to go to work. My students produce the school newspaper and a biannual magazine. I continue to officiate high school football, where I serve as a referee and crew chief for the Arizona Interscholastic Association, and I’m a foster mom to three sons. (Do moms get hats? I think they should.)

This March, my third novel, The Scent of Rain, will be published by the Amphorae Publishing Group. The book tells the story of 16-year old Rose who has been raised in the polygamous community of Colorado, City, Arizona and who dreams of becoming a science teacher. But the cult in which she lives has shut down the school and is only interested in her marrying and producing children. Rose meets a strange boy, Adan, who is also on the run, and together they escape into the mountains. Searchers are quickly on their trail. There are outsiders who want to help, but can Rose and Adan trust these adults, or will they be forced to return to the abuse and cruelty they’ve fled?

Like my other two novels, A Light in the Desert and Nothing But Echoes, The Scent of Rain is inspired by facts and true events, proving that it’s hard for me to take that reporter’s hat off.

The white hat is one of many I’ve worn over the years.