Karen E. Olson

Welcome to my MWA page. I'd offer you a cup of coffee, but I seem to have finished off the pot. A glass of wine, perhaps, as you peruse?

Twenty years of working in newsrooms with mice, moldy carpeting, out-of-date computer systems, cranky editors, weird reporters and an even odder public lent itself nicely to writing a mystery series about a police reporter whose affinity for the f-word has made me a target for little old ladies who like to email me about their displeasure with that.

I got tired of working nights and weekends, so I finally left the newspaper business. Now I work part-time at Yale Medical School editing a student-run journal. There are no mice there. At least not in my office. I hear they keep the mice on another floor in a controlled environment, not running willy nilly like they were at the newspaper.

And since I've been out of the newsroom for a while now, I decided to disregard all that "write what you know" stuff and am now writing a series about a tattoo artist in Las Vegas. I have no tattoos and I've been to Vegas exactly twice. The Internet is a beautiful thing when it comes to research.

I live in the suburbs of New Haven with my husband, who is run ragged by a top elected state official, and my daughter, who is 12 going on 16. We have two overweight cats. I am addicted to Scrabble on Facebook. That's pretty much my life in a nutshell.