Hmmm ... not sure what I say here.
I was born in San Francisco and then hijacked by my family and taken kicking and screaming to Alaska. I escaped briefly to the East Coast but ended up back in Alaska for many years where I was a social worker having 'clients' stick nine Pitbull terriers in my work car - the incident was included in a training video on what not to do when you are a social worker - working with children who had killed, and watching mother and baby Orca whales a few yards away from me in the pouring rain in Juno for several hours as tears streamed down my face. I also slept one night in a motel room with a baby elephant on the Alcan to save it from the freezing cold and got chased by a grizzly bear in my ragtop Jeep.
But what I wanted to do above all was to return to San Francisco, and I have!
My proudest writing moments have been the completion of 'Jungle Rot,' having listened to the Reverend Jim Jones's self-obsessed voice for months on end as he narrated every banal moment of his life - he narrated the most gruesome act of his life, too: the murder of nearly a thousand men, women and children in Jonestown - and the publication of 'The Funeral Bride' about the early life of Empress Alexandra with whom I have been obsessed for twenty-five years.
My most successful books have been my 'Autobiography of Empress Alexandra' series (I am currently writing Book Four), 'The Wedding Gift,' which I wrote as a fun murder-horror story after I had finished the true horror of 'Jungle Rot,' and 'The Night My Husband Killed Me,' about the deaths of four women, including the beautiful and talented Natalie Wood.
I really enjoy researching the background to my books and conducting interviews with sources, but as for the actual process of writing, I agree with Walter Winchell, who said, "you simply sit down at your typewriter, open a vein and bleed.'
Kathleen McKenna Hewtson
September 2016.
I was born in San Francisco and then hijacked by my family and taken kicking and screaming to Alaska. I escaped briefly to the East Coast but ended up back in Alaska for many years where I was a social worker having 'clients' stick nine Pitbull terriers in my work car - the incident was included in a training video on what not to do when you are a social worker - working with children who had killed, and watching mother and baby Orca whales a few yards away from me in the pouring rain in Juno for several hours as tears streamed down my face. I also slept one night in a motel room with a baby elephant on the Alcan to save it from the freezing cold and got chased by a grizzly bear in my ragtop Jeep.
But what I wanted to do above all was to return to San Francisco, and I have!
My proudest writing moments have been the completion of 'Jungle Rot,' having listened to the Reverend Jim Jones's self-obsessed voice for months on end as he narrated every banal moment of his life - he narrated the most gruesome act of his life, too: the murder of nearly a thousand men, women and children in Jonestown - and the publication of 'The Funeral Bride' about the early life of Empress Alexandra with whom I have been obsessed for twenty-five years.
My most successful books have been my 'Autobiography of Empress Alexandra' series (I am currently writing Book Four), 'The Wedding Gift,' which I wrote as a fun murder-horror story after I had finished the true horror of 'Jungle Rot,' and 'The Night My Husband Killed Me,' about the deaths of four women, including the beautiful and talented Natalie Wood.
I really enjoy researching the background to my books and conducting interviews with sources, but as for the actual process of writing, I agree with Walter Winchell, who said, "you simply sit down at your typewriter, open a vein and bleed.'
Kathleen McKenna Hewtson
September 2016.