Introduction

Hi! Welcome to my blog!

Please fee free to check out my webpage, http://home.mchsi.com/~riweber/. I'm Rochelle Weber and I am an author, editor and professional grandma. My first book Rock Bound, will be released by Inara Press on May 15. http://inrarpress.com More about that later. We're doing some wonderful things at Inara and that's a post all its own.

This is my first blog, so please bear with me while I get the hang of it. I guess, I'll start by telling you about myself. I was born and raised on the Northwest Side of Chicago and yes, I'm a Cubs fan. In fact, in 1969 I was a Bleacher Bum! I graduated from Schurz High School in the top third of my class. There were over 800 of us, so that's a pretty decent achievement. I was one of those kids with a paragraph under her photo in the school yearbook, and another paragraph's worth of off-campus extracurricular activities such as Girl Scouts, Junior Achievement, Candy Striping, church choir and babysitting. And my love of reading developed early as well.

After high school, I worked for Ma Bell and became a USO volunteer. It was the only way I could meet boys with short hair in those days. Hanging out at the USO led to my joining the Navy. I became a medic (CorpsWave) and worked in the surgical ICU at the Navy Hospital in Oakland. I married a man I had met at the USO just before I left for boot camp and transfered to Pearl Harbor when he was assigned to a submarine there. I lasted about two, three months there before I got that malady that women sometimes get on their honeymoons. I was medically discharged from the Navy and Elizabeth Anne was born September 6, 1973 at the Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu. By the time we left Hawaii, we had acquired a fluff-butt pooch named Peaches, and Christine Renee was five weeks old.

I had always written short stories and such for fun. It was in the back of my head that I'd write when I retired. But I got serious about it when we were living in Charleston, SC and I was working as a receptionist at our local NPR affiliate. One of our producers noticed a letter I was writing to my family on my lunch-hour and said "Rochelle, you can really write!" She began to mentor me and I finally started college with an eye toward writing.

Well, college was a meandering path. After my husband got out of the Navy he began working outages at various nuclear power plants around the country. I was tired of staying home alone while he was at sea, so I quit my job at the radio station, packed up the kids and the dog, and we went on the road with him. That lasted for four years before it tore our marriage apart and I moved home, got another secretarial job, and went back to school. I finally got my bachelor's degree--in Communications with an emphasis on FictionWriting--at Columbia College, Chicago.

I continued to work in secretarial/administrative positions for over ten years until I became disabled and then I finally started to write again. I met several people in the Chicago Science Fiction community and began to attend sci-fi cons. I discovered that they weren't just a bunch of geeks dressing up like Klingons and getting authorgraphs. The cons I've attended all have at least a few workshops related to writing and publishing your work. Some even offer opportunities to meet editors and agents, as well as published authors. They're marvelous venues for networking. And that's how I made the first contact who hired me to edit her books. Then she recommended my services on the EPIC website and since then my career has snowballed and I am now editing for three publishers, one of whom has accepted my book.

So, here I am--setting up a webpage, registering for a domain name, and setting up a blog.

Again, please visit my website at http://home.mchsi.com/~riweber/.

I'll post an update when my domain name is registered and set up.

Many Thanks.