Welcome to my corner of the web. My name is Joanne with an e and no, the e wasn’t a mistake. As the story goes, my mother wanted the name Joanna, my father wanted the name Josephine. So they compromised and named me Joanne. Then, ironically, as far as I can remember…Dad called me Josephine, Mum called me Joseph, and everyone else called me Jo until I married into a family with a Joe. To avoid confusion, everyone started calling me Joanne and now very few call me anything else. There’s always an exception to any rule though, and in this case, that would be my kids. To them I’m Mom, or if it’s the youngest talking, it’s Mama.
I never wanted to be more than a wife and mother and though I began a career in culinary arts (aka. I cooked food) and studied photography, the blessing of husband and children was more satisfying than any career I could pursue. With my focus on them, I was happy to create a home and when the time came, take on the role of educator to our children. Along with those tasks, I enjoyed spending time sewing, stitching, and reading.
As a voracious reader, I’ll read almost anything I can get my hands on. As a fast reader, a typical full-length novel takes just a few hours to read. My reading record was set on Christmas Day at the age of 14 when I was given four full length novels and had them all read by the evening. With a family to care for now, I’m not able to devote quite that much time to reading, but I still read whenever I can, often staying up late into the night to finish a particularly captivating book.
One dreadful day, I ran out of reading material. I’d read and reread everything I owned to the point I didn’t need to read those books anymore. I already knew exactly what was going to happen and when. And then an idea began to take shape. I could write my own books.
So I started writing. Short stories that were mostly deleted during a great file purge. Some were saved for nostalgic reasons, but few slipped through the cracks. After a while, busy with new additions to the family, I lost interest in writing, but never lost interest in creating stories. Any spare moment I had, my mind would be busy, conjuring up scenarios, developing dialog, bringing to life the pictures in my head.
And so, for ten years, I worked on crafting stories in my head until one day I realized my mother was in the same boat I’d been in ten years before. Isolated in the Australian outback, she had nothing to read. So I wrote her a story. Which led to another story. Which led to another. And then one day I sat down with NaNoWriMo looming ahead of me and asked her if she had any ideas. She shared a dream she’d had that I was able to turn into a book, Dreaming of More, which was released on July 25th.
Yes, along with being a writer, a reader, a wife, and mother, I am also a Christian. I may not talk about it often, but my faith influences every aspect of my life. My books reflect my own standards and morals and while I’m not going to start preaching fire and brimstone, I trust you will see my Lord in the stories I write and will be drawn closer to Him.
May you be encouraged, blessed, and entertained by the stories I write. You can be assured that nothing you read from me will contain anything questionable. For several reasons, one of which is…my Dad’s going to read my books, I just know it, and I really don’t want to make him mad. 