Author information-Rachel Smith

This is Home.

Rachel was born too many years ago on Okinawa. An Air Force brat, she exhibited early symptoms of "The grass is always greener" syndrome. Once her dad retired from the military, she extracted a promise from her mom that she'd never have to move again--then promptly began spending the rest of her life wishing she could travel almost constantly.

Rachel "wrote" her first book at seven years old. Showing it proudly to her mother, she was shocked to learn that copying out the text of a Little Golden Book didn't constitute creative writing; more work was involved. As a child who was born lazy and had an early, chronic relapse, Rachel waited until the ripe old age of 12 to finish her first "real" novel. Deciding that the finished product was pretty horrendous, she gave it one more try the next year, then elected to wait until she was in her thirties to have a go at a third.

On review, that one is pretty horrendous too. None of those three appear in these pages or anywhere else that could be considered a public venue. And they never will.

After writing the first two bad novels, dropping out of college and spawning three offspring, Rachel decided she should do something productive with her life, or at least learn more about human nature if she was going to write. The process of earning an advanced psychology degree led to the accumulation of one more child, the third really rotten novel and an amazing amount of student loan debt. Since then, Rachel hasn't worked more than eighteen months total in the field of head-shrinking, has limited further progeny to grandchildren (thank heaven!) and has finally learned something about what goes into a decent book. She has also turned her husband from a man who used to inquire "What's for supper?" at the same time every day, with every expectation of a civil and hopefully appetizing answer, to a man who is completely at home in the kitchen and knows better than to even poke his head in the office door some days, much less open his mouth to speak.

All joking aside, I've been blessed. I have four wonderful kids who became wonderful adults, and a husband who has evolved with me through some really rocky years for us both. I'm finally free to write almost as much and often as I'd like, and I look forward to living the rest of my life on the same stretch of countryside my grandmother and wandering mother called home.

Now if I could just get my own deep-water sailboat. As Captain Jack says, in Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean--"Bring me that horizon."