The opportunity to CREATE while the day is new, and the birds and other "critters" are the only noise I hear outside the windows. Creating for me can come in day dreaming while listening to the morning sounds, with my coffee in hand, or at the computer, or with a notebook in the car, waiting for one of the kids to get out of school.

I read a lot of fiction, and Ken Follett is at the top of my favorites list there. I also have enjoyed the works of Margaret Atwood, Leon Uris, Marge Piercy, Sheri Tepper and Ursula K LeGuin. In the non-fiction genre, I enjoy writings by Dr Wayne Dyer, Louise Hay, Dr. Bruce Lipton and Gregg Braden. I have been a major fan of Kouzes and Posner's Leadership Challenge work since I was introduced to their work in graduate school.

I can often be found in the classroom, teaching (as an adjunct) in one of my areas of expertise in health care (laboratory sciences and health information management). I enjoy the interaction with students and find that no matter how long I have taught a particular subject, there is ALWAYS something profound to be learned from each group of students.

I get a lot of recommendations from friends and colleagues, and there are trusted outlets that promote eBooks (e.g. Hay House). The first Smashwords book that I bought and read was a mystery written by an instructor in a fiction-writing class that I took online. I loved it, and wrote her a glowing review on Amazon.com

Right now I am working on a book for high school students (and their parents) that follows a similar theme. When I was a community college dean and faculty member in health professions programs, I had tremendous opportunities to speak with high school students about careers. It became very clear to me that their goals were often misaligned with the realities of the workforce, and their own abilities. It was also clear that high school teachers, while wonderfully supportive coaches, too often failed to encourage the hard questions of these students about their choices. Like Finding Your Way: uncover your path to a better job, this next book in the Finding Your Way series is a guide for high school students that promises to help them make better choices about their lives after high school.

No but my mother might. I have written short stories all my life, and was blessed to grow up in a family of readers, live in an area where the school district was well-funded, the teachers top rate and the education second to none. Since I grew up in rural America and my grandparents had a mid-sized working farm, I suspect I wrote something about farm animals - perhaps barn kittens - which would have been a major captivator of my interest and imagination at the time.

I have (and use) a Barnes & Noble color Nook, a Kindle Fire and an Apple iPad mini. I have certain things I prefer to read on each, and when I travel for business (I still have a day job), all 3 can be found in my carry-on backpack.

As a teaching faculty member at a major university, I found that the students often needed coaching around how to think about jobs and work. Sometimes this was due to the expectations their parents put on them, or they put on themselves. Other times it was due to the fact that they were first generation college students. When I came to the teaching role, I had been out in the work world for some time and was able to coach them from a manager's and not just a faculty perspective. My lectures on the topic of interviewing, choosing a job, resumes and more resonated with many students. I am still in contact with many former students who often shoot me an email to say, "Thanks for that advice back in school - it proved very useful last month" or to ask me to review a resume or just to bounce a job decision off of me and get my opinion. I decided that there were probably more people out there who could benefit from what I have to share, so I put together my process for finding a better fit in work (from my own experience) along with the various "wisdom" points from my years in academia. The result was Finding Your Way: uncover your path to a better job.

This is an evolving process as I am new at this, but - reaching out to my networks that I already had in place on LinkedIn and FaceBook has been good so far. In addition, I have a blog that I write on several times a week, and I carry business cards, as well as samples of my work (the Finding Your Way process) which I am known to whip out at a moment's notice and share with complete strangers.

I have always disliked the "dog-n-pony" dance required just to survive in corporate America. I viewed traditional publishing as another version of that, so the whole concept of Indie publishing and letting me succeed (or not) based solely on the value I put forth to the audience appealed to me in a big way.

I describe my desk as being the archetypical nutty professor's desk. I'll leave the visual up to you.