(I’m more interested in European history than American. My second was written to see if I could write another novel and continued the story of the first, but branching off into Virginia and the ugliness of slavery. My first novel was written to deal with a heartbreak in my life (not the one in the novel), and I wrapped it around the South Sea Bubble, which was a Great Depression of its time. I’ve written brochures, poster copy, web zine copy, annual reports, press releases, you name it. I never imagined I’d be a writer, but all my life I’ve made my living that way not only in fiction, but by working for local magazines and specialty news periodicals. More interesting than the Dick and Jane readers assigned in school, though I gobbled those up, too. By the time I learned to read, I was sneaking Grandfather’s square, cheap (a dime, I think) paperbacks and reading them. My grandfather, an invalid, was a huge fan of the writers Frank Slaughter, Frank Yerby, and Zane Grey. When life around me was dull or incomprehensible, there was always a book, another place and time to wander in, adventures someone else had that I could share. But books fed my soul and my mind and my heart. “Karleen, get your head out of that book.” If I heard it once, I heard it a million times. And I read, read when I was sad, read when I was glad, read when I didn’t understand my friends, read when I didn’t fit in. My father was a merchant marine, and we settled near the Port of Houston. I was the aftermath of a world war, the nation moving from its rural roots to the cities, and the GI Bill. They were as real to me as the life around me, a lower-middle-class one in a small oil refinery town in Texas. My childhood was filled with glorious books: Little Women, Lad: A Dog, Black Beauty, Little House on the Prairie, Caddie Woodlawn. Books have always been a lifeline for me a place I went to escape, to learn, to feel.

Before Versailles by Karleen Koen