Deborah Doucette-Dudman

I grew up in a large, close-knit Italian family held together by hard working Italian immigrant grandparents and big, boisterous Sunday macaroni dinners. I married young and had four children spread out, in a wholly unplanned fashion, over twenty years. I painted - oils and later watercolor - volunteered for arts groups, studied with a locally famous painter, traveled to the ocean as often possible and became a real estate broker.

At exactly forty years of age, with a (surprise) two-year-old, and two teenagers, I decided it was time for reinvention. I recall sitting on the edge of my bed with my head in my hands asking myself, what do you really want to do? The answer was, write! I enrolled - two-year-old in tow - in a creative and business writing program at a local college and quickly decided business writing wasn't for me. My creative writing professor pulled me out of class one day and as we sat on the stairs outside of the classroom, he looked me in the eye and told me I was an honest-to-god writer. It was the second time a teacher shared that opinion with me, but the first time it impelled me to action. I began to solicit and get assignments from local newspapers and was tooting along under a head of steam with the goal of writing for a nationally recognized paper until life happened; my youngest, Sabra, was born. Her arrival into our family brought me unexpected blessings, including the opportunity to become involved in the issues of grandparents raising grandchildren which lead to my first book, Raising Our Children's Children. Since then, I have updated the first edition and a revision will be published as Room In The Heart in Spring 2014. In addition, I am a blogger for the Huffington Post on their Huff Post 50 site (for the over fifty crowd) www.huffingtonpost.com/deborah-doucette/ . My novel, Bad Girls, has been released. Visit my website at www.deborahdoucette.weebly.com to see Bad Girls' sneak peak!

Since writing my first book, life has spun me around sending me in new directions a few more times; I'm now a breast cancer survivor, and a divorced single mom. I live in a small country suburb outside of Boston in an 1840s village farmhouse with my big, red poodle, Fiamma (flame in Italian - Fia for short) surrounded by my art and joyfully entertained by the comings and goings of my twin grandbabies. I am currently working on a new novel.