Pat Winter

Born on the Mississippi in Tennessee, raised in Arkansas, and educated in California, Pat Winter continues the Madoc Saga with its prequel JAGUAR KING, Book One in the Mississippi Saga that will eventually recount the career of the Great River Road from the year 987 through 1865. JAGUAR KING marries fierce Mayan ballgame action-adventure and exotic romance with ancestors of characters in the first two books of The Madoc Saga, MADOC and MADOC's HUNDRED. Pat researched the fourth book, SONGS OF THE BIG CANOE in Wales. Legend has it that Prince Madoc, son of the last Celtic King of Wales, set sail for the New World from the spot where Pat watched ships anchor at Lundy Isle. (Read more about the four books of the Madoc Saga and her other stories at the Authors Guild site, http://www.patwinter.net.) Her first short story about children raised INSIDE MOTHER, a surrogate mama-ship-habitat, was published under the married byline DeGraw in the 1970 science fiction anthology Infinity One by Lancer Books. Pat was by then a single mother studying under a USC journalism scholarship. Believing Mark Twain's opinion that "News is history in its first and most vivid form, of which history is only the pale, tranquil reflection," she took a B.A. in print journalism at USC, and later a Masters in Documentary Film at UCLA. Analog Magazine, April 1973 featured a second s.f. tale, POLIMANDER'S MAN-THING. That story is expanded into the completed, as yet unpublished novel, LOG OF THE DOG. She loved work as a reporter for the San Diego Union and later writer, editor and on-air reporter at KFWB All News Radio in LA where she sold the story for the ABC TV movie, SOMEONE I TOUCHED. To support composing her first published novel, the thriller-romance DRIVER spun around sexy astral projection, she taught media and writing at USC and LA Valley Community College. In New York she worked the phones at the Field Survey, was a tech writer for a computer consultancy, and taught broadcast writing at the former School for Media Arts before launching her first historical novel: WOMAN CALLED ARKANSAS was originally published under the Bantam title RIVER OF DESTINY based on the memoirs of the French soldier-of-fortune Henri deTonti. Known as the Father of Arkansas, second-in-command and surveyor of the 17th c. LaSalle Expedition, Tonti lived the rest of his life in French Louisiana on the Great River Road that continues its stream through Pat Winter's life, work and dreams.