I began working in journalism and broadcasting because there weren't many women in minorities in the 1970s in newsrooms, in the United States, and I had an opportunity for an internship in television news in Portland, Oregon. I always encourage students or anybody who can get an internship if they can, because it really helps open the door. So I spent many years in radio-TV on the air, as an anchor, and as a reporter. I moved to New York City in the mid-nineties, I had switched by then, to writing for print. It was something I taught myself to do and undertook over a few years because writing for newspapers and magazines is very, very different than writing radio and television copy. So I was a print reporter. I'd gone to a master's program in playwriting at Brown and got an M. F. A and went to New York to become a theater critic and was able to do that, along the way I always knew I wanted the chance to write more, and that I was interested in maybe getting into books, I had no idea if it would be fiction or nonfiction, but I came back to Seattle eventually and did an article for The Seattle Times, which I realized there's never been a book about this crime, and I did my first book about 10 years ago, and that just opened a lot of doors. So I've done a lot of things, always writing based journalism, whatever I did in journalism for 30 years helped me, when I was making the transition to writing books. Daily deadlines and knowing how to work with an editor but also work on your own prepared me to become an author.

I always have a specific audience, I think an author has to have a specific audience because especially if you're pitching a proposal or an idea to an agent, and a publisher, you have to convince them why this will sell, and part of that is, who's going to buy this book, who's going to read it, my most recent book is called "Boy Missing, The Search For Kyron Horman", it's a story about a Portland, Oregon boy who went missing from his grade school exactly 10 years ago and has never been found. It's what police call a nobody case because they have not found him. Prosecutors in America are often reluctant to bring criminal charges against somebody when there's nobody, they either have a confession or a body. But I wanted to do more than just tell the story of Kyron's missing and get into the fact that there are some experts who say nobody cases can be prosecuted, that there is a way this case and others could be prosecuted. What I did early on is I wrote a letter, an old fashioned letter to the boy's mother in Oregon, and explain why I was interested in telling her story, and Kyron story and she texted me right away and said she'd been praying that the right author would come along, so this was more than three years ago, it was a long, arduous book. Non-fiction is a lot of work, fiction's too, but nonfiction and true crime, the book can take years and years, this took more than three years, and it meant working with her, and the other family members treading pretty carefully. But also, being independent of them because I can't tell an unbiased story if I'm worried about what the boy's mother is going to think, I of course didn't want to upset anybody but to be impartial, you have to know that you may be stepping on some toes. So this book came out in June of this year exactly on the 10th anniversary of the boy's disappearance. I grew up in Oregon, so I knew what a huge story it is in the Northwest and I did all the marketing and publicity myself, and the book has done really well. It's a lot of work, I always say you don't know what you don't know and the only way to find out what you don't know is to jump in. So I mean years of research and interviews, but from the beginning, you're thinking about how am I going to shape this book. The most important thing an author has to decide is, how am I going to tell this story because there is an unlimited number of ways to tell a nonfiction story, deciding how to tell it. In this case, the boy was living with his step mother and father and everyone believes, including the police, that the stepmother did something with him, they have not been able to charge her, and it's a dreadful situation, but, I think it's a story that also relates to other stories I've told. In fact, of my eight or nine books, it's the third book about a missing person, and I found I'm really fixated. If you interested in stories of missing people because they're the ultimate mysteries, we do not know what happened, and so that's my most recent book. I'm actually going to take a break, I'm writing my first novel right now, and it's a completely different experience, I will say it's more fun, but it is still a lot of work.

I often follow crimes as they unfold over many years, and the Kyron Horman case in Oregon, the subject of my latest book was one of those. He disappeared in 2010 and I was following that for years because not every case is a book, publishers like an ending of some kind. I've done a number of books that are not wrapped up neatly, there is no ending, the body of the boy hasn't been found, but I think, in its own way it is unending when it's unresolved. I think not every story has a neat, tidy ending, but three years ago I thought "Okay, he'd been missing seven years", at that point. I thought enough is enough, I want to tell this story. A few other authors had contacted his birth mother, and I think I was persuasive and making the case about how I wanted to do this. You can't do a book like this, without the help of a family, not every true crime book requires family help, but particularly when somebody is still missing, it's an open case. Police never ever spoke to me or made anything available to me. You have to know, as an author going into a book that's an open case, that you're not going to have the help of the police department, there's no trial transcript because there is no arrest yet. So you have to approach it from what can you get from journalism that was written at the time about the case, what family and observers can tell you about, so it's very different than writing about a case that may be revisiting the Manson case or revisiting an older case that's been told many times.