Karen E. Olson

I’ve lived in Connecticut all my life, except for four years in the Blue Ridge Mountains at Roanoke College in Virginia, where I was an English major and read a lot of dead white male British writers, and almost two years in Miami, where I first worked in advertising and then rewrote policies and procedures for an international securities and investigations company. Not able to afford a car with air conditioning, I left Florida and came back to my home state, where I worked at a weekly newspaper for a salary that made me eligible for food stamps.

I’d always wanted to be a writer, so journalism seemed a logical career choice. My first story was an interview with the new dog warden in the small town of Deep River, and I spent a lot of time at planning and zoning and school board meetings. I hopped from small paper to small paper, until finding out I could make a decent wage working nights as a copy editor.

Being a vampire wasn't so bad, and I started writing fiction in the middle of the night when I got home from work. I had been reading a lot of Oprah-type books, in which women characters spent a lot of time being victims. I discovered that in mysteries, the women protagonists were smart and didn’t allow themselves to be victimized. I decided that was the sort of character I wanted to create.

I left the newspaper business in 2006 after a 20-year career. I now edit a medical journal part-time at Yale. It's made life a lot more simple, and I have more time to devote to my fiction writing, dealing with my teenage daughter, and enjoying gourmet dinners created by my husband, who is also a writer.

— Karen E. Olson