Honoring my final proofreader:

It’s been almost three weeks since my mom passed away, and I want to share my memories of her.

First, there’s a lot of her personality in Fenway Stevenson. Her attitude, for one—and her unshakability when she had conviction about an important topic. There’s even more of her in Bernadette Becker, which is probablyone reason she didn’t like Bernadette as much as she liked Fenway!

She was the last proofreader in the line of early readers, editors, and sensitivity readers who read my books in their various stages of pre-publication. And even in early March 2024, when she could only stay awake for a few hours a day, she still caught dozens of typos and inconsistencies in The Warehouse Coroner that everyone else had missed.

My mom in 1997 near Carmel-by-the-Sea, a town about a hundred miles north of the fictional Estancia, where the Fenway Stevenson books are set.

 

When she finally realized she couldn’t live on her own and moved to Seattle to stay with my cousin, we still had weekly computer sessions over Skype. That’s me, part son, part tech support!

I found out a lot of new stuff about her when I went through her papers in the last couple of weeks. I knew she had taught English in South Korea a few years after the war ended—but I didn’t realize it was against the advice of pretty much everyone in her life. I found her journal during those months, and it’s eye-opening.

When she returned to the States, she had enough money to buy a house. This was in the early sixties, a time when no bank would give a mortgage loan to women—but she bought the house anyway.

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