Deborah Sharp

I'm pleased you found your way to my listing. I still can't get over the fact I'm a bona-fide novelist. After 20-some years as a fact-bound journalist, I'm thrilled to finally have a say in how my stories turn out. I hope you've had the chance to read MAMA DOES TIME and MAMA RIDES SHOTGUN, the first two books in my funny, Florida-set series. Better yet, I hope you liked them, as well as Book 3, 2010's MAMA GETS HITCHED. If you did, please check out my latest release: MAMA SEES STARS (Midnight Ink, 2011).

I was born in Fort Lauderdale, to a family with roots deep in Florida. In two decades covering the state, mostly as a reporter for USA Today, I found some spots so off-the-map they surprised even a native like me. Molasses Junction. Bagdad (yes, without the H). Myakka City. I knew if I ever wrote a novel (every journalist's secret dream!), I'd set it some place like those down-home spots. Enter the mythical town of Himmarshee, Fla. It's a figment of my imagination, based on an authentic part of the state --cattle ranches and citrus groves; sweet tea and barbecue. Himmarshee is like Okeechobee, except tinier. And it's like Davie, where as a girl I rode my Quarter horse, before the ranches and orange trees vanished under asphalt. I love little towns. Even met my TV reporter husband in 1983 in Immokalee, Fla., competing for stories on a winter-vegetable freeze. Kerry Sanders and I have been married forever. No pets. No kids. We had goldfish once. Turned out badly.