A word about bios, and not incidentally, writing.

I like to think it doesn't matter who I am if you like my work. But if you've read something I've written and decided you'd like to know more, or if you'd rather know where an author is coming from before you pull out your credit card and order a book, then . . .

Probably the most important thing to know about me is that my approach to writing is the same as it is to reading. I find fiction . . . whether I am immersed in someone else's good book . . . or whether I'm spinning the yarn, to be a magical escape.

My characters are composites that come to me, at first visually. Then I choose a name, sit down and write, "I am so-and-so." What comes out through my fingers onto the page is like when someone says, "Tell me about yourself."

My plots come only in the smallest way from my own life because when I write I'm escaping. I confess to having never fought a fire as in Summer of Fire, or seen a live volcano as in Rain of Fire, but other people have told me about it.

I often borrow stories. One day I was having lunch with an outfitter friend who arranges adventure travel all over the world. He told me a harrowing experience of his own while river fishing in Canada. Seems he fell out of an inflatable boat into thirty-something degree water while not wearing a life vest, trundled along through a logjam, getting caught several times, thought he was dead . . . and emerged to tell the story. I turned that into a woman falling from horseback into the Snake River in the year 1900, getting caught in a logjam and . . .

Lots of folks have one or another version of the same question for authors, along the line of, "Where do you get your ideas?" Once when I was at the Jackson Hole Writer's Conference, someone popped the question. Author and screenwriter Tim Sandlin replied, "There's a secret Internet site . . ."

I like to compare ideas to soap bubbles. Only instead of having a bubble exist and pop into oblivion, this bubble appears from nowhere. I was in a gas station automated carwash, where you can't see anything through the suds, when I suddenly imagined a scene in which someone enters the car through a back door as the vehicle disappears into the tunnel. Under cover of clouds of spray, he or she strangles the driver. When the car is released from automated control, it rolls down, driverless, and bumps into the curb.

An author fades in and out of that magic other world all the time. One day when I was exiting my health club locker room, I was struggling with a plot problem. There was going to be a big earthquake; my characters would be caught in a canyon on horseback, but what would happen to raise the stakes? I thought about killing or injuring one of my main folks, but knew I needed them to be fully functional shortly thereafter for the book's climax. As I opened the door, it came to me.

"Kill the horses," I said . . . right into the startled face of a woman carrying her gym bag.

So if she, and the rest of you, want to know who that deranged woman was, here's a brief edition of my life story.

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Born a university brat and trained at the Master's level in Geology, I was one of Exxon Corporation's first woman field geologists. Before my 2004 move to New Mexico, I lived in Houston and Dallas and worked for a number of oil and gas companies on the front line where new fields are found. This fascinating and stimulating career was a roller coaster, with discoveries and dry holes, but I wouldn't change a minute of it.

Growing up in Greenville, South Carolina, fiction came to me when I was very young. Already an avid reader, I'd hit a ball against a wall and tell myself stories . . . about people who lived in New York City, a place I'd only read about in Dorothy B. Hughes's and Jacqueline Susann's work. By age thirteen, I'd taught myself to hunt and peck on Dad's old Royal Typewriter and started writing novels. In addition to New York, my characters roamed Hollywood, Yosemite and Hawaii. I even featured a Saudi Arabian princess attending college in America (after careful research of Medina and Mecca in the 1963 World Book Encyclopedia). My largest effort was over one hundred single-spaced, typewritten pages. Eventually, I decided, as many adolescents do, that my mother might be reading my material, so I had a bonfire in the backyard. This is certainly a blessing for posterity, as well as for me. Now, no one will ever know how truly awful those works must have been.

I published poetry and a short story the Greenville High School literary magazine, known as Bits o'Lit. In college at Furman University and doing graduate work at The Ohio State University, I studied science and my fiction took a back burner to technical writing. I did read, though, voraciously: James Mitchener, Ian Fleming, Ken Follett, Margaret Mitchell, Ayn Rand, and Nora Roberts to sample a few.

After a twenty-year layoff, in 1992, I joined Rice University's novel writing program, chaired by American Book Award winner Venkatesh Kulkarni. I studied with this consummate teacher and author for a total of six years, until he passed away.

Then, following the old adage that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear, I met Rita Gallagher. Renowned author of novels and non-fiction works on writing, Rita has taught over two hundred published authors. She focuses on novel structure and helped me go from writing great scenes to putting a book together. Though Rita turned eighty while I was her pupil, her mind was still sharp enough to find a sentence on page seventy that belonged on page seventeen. Unfortunately, she passed away in early 2004, and the world lost a grand lady.

Married to fellow geoscientist Richard Jacobs, I divide my time between the West and the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia where my father owns a working farm. I enjoy adventure travel, having scuba dived the Caribbean, taken two African safaris, and gone alpine hiking in New Zealand and the Spanish Pyrenees. And of course, I regularly visit Yellowstone.

Among the thousands of summer warriors battling to save America's crown jewel, is single mother Clare Chance. Having just watched her best friend, a fellow Texas firefighter, die in a roof collapse, she has fled to Montana to try and put the memory behind her. She's not the only one fighting personal demons as well as the fiery dragon threatening to consume the park.

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News Flash: Children of Dynasty by Linda Jacobs writing as Christine Carroll has been nominated for a 2005 RT Reviewers Choice Award for Best Small Press Romance

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