About

All about Author Susan Rich

Well, not everything. A gal’s gotta keep some secrets. But here’s some tea.

I’m a double-Aries, born on the Taurus cusp. Stubborn doesn’t begin to cover it.

Early pictures show a chunky baby bearing a distinct resemblance to Winston Churchill, except I had more chins.

By my first birthday, I weighed 30 lbs, far too heavy for my petite mother to lug around.

She parked me in my play-pen, and it wasn’t a bad deal. Every day, she and her Canasta-loving friends fed me morsels of food and admired my bodacious bod.

I didn’t walk until I was two.

My mother claims she took me to the shoe store weekly, in hopes that putting shoes on my white-stockinged feet would get me moving.

It didn’t. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Rich,” the salesman reportedly told her time and again. “We don’t put shoes on babies until they’re walking.”

I didn’t speak until I was past two.

My mother took me to the doctor.

“She’ll speak when she has something to say,” he told her. “She’ll walk when she has somewhere to be.”

Potty-training was also a non-starter. Same doctor was equally blase: “I have never seen a bride walk down the aisle in a diaper.”

I started walking.

I started talking.

Both on the same day.

After spending two and a half years living like a much-adored panda in the zoo, I climbed out of the play-pen.

My first words could have been my last.

As the story goes: I waddled to the table where my grandpa was playing poker. From the safety of his lap, I read all the cards in his hand, revealing his Royal Flush.

In the years that followed, I fell in love with journalism, earned my degree, worked for a paper, failed, worked for Boeing, got laid off, worked for high tech, quit out of misery.

I also lost my primary family on my 38th birthday, the day we also buried my grandpa.

It was their idea.

In the brutal aftermath, I worked for an antique store, a bookstore, and a chocolate shop.

By 2007 I was ready to re-start my career, this time as a self-employed writer-for-hire. My timing was perfect!! The Great Recession hit two months later.

Over the next 15 years, I self-published a handful of books, became a sought-after public speaker, and ultimately helped hundreds of people end the job search by teaching them how to write cover letters. I also volunteered for Dress for Success, and was part of a team that helped more than 1,800 women find jobs. All this during those ugly, desperate years that followed the Great Recession.

Writing fiction is not my natural gift. Dialog, yes, setting, no. Were it up to me, my stories would take place in mid-air.

After many years of try, try again, of hours spent trying to describe the roar of the ocean, the smell of coffee, or what kind of blue is the sky, I am in the midst of revising The Gemstone Crossword Puzzle Series. Not just one book. There’ s another. And another. And, um, a fourth.

TIMELINE

Born: Long Island, NY.

From Great Neck to Little Neck, from Little Neck to Plainview. Young me forever confused by the idea of big and little necks and what they had to do with where my house was located, as opposed to the skinny tube connecting head to shoulders. A career in medicine was not in my future.

Moved: My grandma claimed I had sand in my shoes.

From New York to Phoenix when I was 9; from Phoenix to Edmonds, Washington when I was 22; from Edmonds to Portland, Oregon when I was 25. Aside from a few hops between apartments and houses, I have been a Pacific NW gal ever since.

Education: I loved school until I didn’t.

The usual train ride. Grade school, middle school, high school (oh the stories, oh the bullying!) Partial scholarship to Northern Arizona University. Graduated cum laude with a BS in News Editorial Journalism, emphasis in psychology. Started advanced studies in Communication at the University of Portland, before Boeing laid me off (along with 45,000 others on the same day) during the merger with McDonnell Douglas.

Real Life: Incoming!

Got married. Got divorced. Got remarried. Currently in the process of living and writing happily ever after. I have been married to Dave for more than 31 years and have shared in the raising of three terrific kids: Allison, Kyle, Rachel. I have two grandjoys, Carter and McKenzie, and one spectacular daughter-in-law, Rose.

That’s the good stuff.

The rest is also good.

Domestic Abuse Survivor. My ex had a nasty habit of binge drinking and using me as a punching bag. Anyone out there living the same — There is life after abuse. There is relief from the shame. You deserve better, always. You do not need to live with someone who hurts you.

Hard No-Contact with Primary Family. Includes my parents, my only sister, and everyone else in that sphere. It defies explanation. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t tried. I am now 20+ years into what I call Family Freedom. I talk about it because I believe severe family conflict is a mental health issue. If it’s okay to say no to your abusive husband/wife/partner it is absolutely okay to ditch anyone who hurts you: even your mother.

And on that note: You’ll see shades of mother-daughter conflict in my writing. No doubt my father is reflected in there, too.

Career: Nothing like I expected

My parents owned a restaurant when I was a teenager. I’ve worked in retail on and off my entire life. Barnes and Noble was one of my favorite jobs, but to be honest, managing a chocolate store was even better. Seriously. Handing out samples to children is the best thing, ever.

After college, after I got married, after we shuffled off to North Seattle, I landed my dream job as a reporter! That lasted about 18 months, before I failed.

I hired on at Boeing because that was Washington State law at the time. I’m kidding–almost. Back then, if you stood still long enough you woke up working for Boeing. At least it seemed that way to me!

After Boeing came that high-tech company. Sheer misery, enough said. Once my family life hit the skids, I had two choices: Quit or have a breakdown. I quit. Had my breakdown anyway.

I sank.

I surfaced.

I became a self-employed, writer-for-hire two months before the Great Recession hit. Bad timing? Yep. For me and millions of others. It also formed the genesis of Gemmy. She’s like me and not. She’s not at all autobiographical, but she does represent the people I came to know during those bitter years.

I managed to keep my solo career rolling until husband Dave retired and we moved to Salem. A few years later, the pandemic hit. Life slowed to molasses. I got bored.

One thing led to another. I am not bored anymore.

What started as a short story about crossword puzzlesquickly grew into a 3-part series, mostly (I’m not kidding here!) written by my muse.

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