Gretchen Jones

This Gretchen Jones was born and raised in Kansas City Missouri. Gifted with an unruly and vivid imagination her earliest memories include being rescued by the television repairman when her head got stuck in an angel food cake pan.   She is old enough to remember eating a grill cheese sandwich at the Woolworth’s lunch counter on the Plaza, and a hot dog with grilled onions at the bowling alley two doors down.  The Plaza is much too hip for this now.

A reader from an early age when her very best friends were novels, she developed a love of the written word that has persisted through adulthood.  In November 2006 at the suggestion of her fabulous friend Meg, she participated in the National Novel Writing Month contest (www.nanowrimo.org) and won by writing a sixty-five thousand word manuscript in thirty days.

At the end of thirty days she had the beginnings of a contemporary romance.  The manuscript wasn’t bad for a first draft so she decided to finish the story (finished at 85,000 words by Dec 15th), polishing it before pursuing publication.  So began the literary adventures of Gretchen Jones, aspiring romance novelist – a work in progress.  As opposed to the very talented Gretchen Jones of Portland and Moth Love and Project Runway fame.  This is not that Gretchen Jones.

This Gretchen has a broad work history with experience scooping ice cream, punching the holes out of donuts, pumping gas (it was under a dollar per gallon at the time - sigh), retail, operating switchboards at places as varied as a forklift manufacturer and a large hotel chain before stumbling into accounting and ultimately information technology.  She has worked for the past twenty plus years in IT, mostly healthcare information systems and currently works as a consulting configuration manager for the US Government.

Over the last twenty years she has written countless thousands of pages of documentation, user manuals, software requirements, interface specifications, marketing literature and has positively determined that technical writing is not an appropriate outlet for her reckless imagination.

She has traveled to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Canada, and England and Scotland (See the photo section for pictures) as well as all across the United States.  A trip to Diamond Crater state park in the fall of 2008, where she wore all her sparkly things so that the diamonds on the ground would be attracted to her and jump up into her bucket on their own, failed to achieve the desired outcome.

Gretchen has a bachelor’s degree in information technology (summa cum laude) and a master’s degree in health systems administration.  She enjoys acoustic music, gave up playing the banjo badly to concentrate on writing genre fiction, has given up her darkroom for digital photography, likes to spend every decent weekend she can camping in her trailer (even some that are not), and of course, she reads constantly and writes when she’s not reading.

She lives with her long time love Steve and a black and white cat, sixth in a series, named “Kitty” who seems to have an underdeveloped sense of danger.