And writing about my overloaded and monetarily-challenged life was great fun and great therapy. With luck a small alternative newspaper offered to publish me early on and I became wayyyy too optimistic about my future success in the publishing world. But I learned a lot about rejection and hanging on over the next 16 years, working in graphics and advertising and car sales and bookmobiles until I was finally lucky ( and stubborn ) enough to get syndicated.  Thank you Universal UClick.

Cartooning was something I had to learn by doing, from great old books like "The Secrets of Professional Cartooning" by Ken Muse and "Backstage at the Strips" by Mort Walker. But it was the first thing I'd ever done in art where time disappeared. I'd start when the kids went to bed and lose myself until one in the morning when I realized the heat had gone off and I was freezing. Because I'd never enjoyed anything as much, because I love writing as well as drawing, because it's just too dang fun to draw and color for a living, I was determined to find a way to make this a profession.

My original comic strip was called "Sister City" and ran for 5 years in my local paper as a weekly feature. The name was changed to "Stone Soup" when my syndicate told me that the original name had tested as "too ardently feminist". Goddess forbid. But a name is just a name, and Stone Soup (which loosely means something from nothing) is a perfect description of my life, and the lives of my characters.