Laura Alden, Author

Laura Alden grew up in a part of Michigan where the prime agricultural products are blueberries and Christmas trees. Back in the day, kids could work in the fields picking berries at age 12, so the day after she turned 12, off she was sent.

The main thing she learned from those summers was that sitting in a classroom isn’t so bad compared to standing in the blazing hot sun for eight hours. The other thing she learned was that while Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden were fun, there was a whole world out there filled with books by authors such as Dick Francis, Josephine Tey, Ellis Peters, and John D. MacDonald.

She came of age in the late seventies. Since her parents told her that all doors were now open to women, she felt obligated to venture into male territory instead of being the English teacher she might have been. Thus she graduated from Eastern Michigan University in the 80’s with a B.S. in geology and spent 25 years in the surveying and civil engineering field. Due to the Great Recession, her current day job is a municipal clerk.

She turned to writing in the late nineties. After a number of years in management, she felt the need to move on and took a job with fewer responsibilities. A month later, she was dead bored and began to consider writing as a way to wake up her brain. She started reading a lot of books on writing and happened across a particular sentence: “What’s it going to be, reasons or results?”

The phrase practically stuck her in the eye. She printed it out, framed it, and put it next to her computer. “Reasons or results?” At the end of her life, was she going to have a pile of reasons for not having done anything? Or was she going to sit down and write a book? Once she started looking at it that way, the decision was easy. A short 13 years later, her first book was published.

Except for a year in Connecticut, she has always lived in Michigan. Thanks to her maternal grandparents, Laura and her husband (and their two very strange cats) have the great good fortune to live on a lake in northern lower Michigan. They spend summers entertaining weekend guests and winters guessing which day the lake is going to freeze over.

They tolerate mud season by tapping maple trees and cooking maple syrup, which they serve to their summer guests on fluffy pancakes accompanied by bacon glazed with maple syrup and covered with chopped pecans.

When Laura isn’t writing, she’s working at her day job, reading, yanking weeds out of her garden, singing in the church choir, or doing some variety of skiing. She also maintains the local chamber of commerce website, plays the piano, and dabbles in photography. All of which makes her sound like an overachiever, but the truth is that there’s only one television in the house and her sports-loving husband controls the remote.