Author Profile

I'm proud to say that The Gatehouse Mystery was the first book I ever bought for myself for my own reading pleasure. I wish I could say I was immediately hooked, but I wasn't. I was in the second grade, just becoming an independent reader, and I think in some ways the series was a bit too mature psychologically for me. While I liked Trixie, for a year or two I preferred the Nancy Drew pablum.

Sometime in the fourth or fifth grade, however, I got sick of Nancy and became completely enamored of Trixie's "real girl-ness." I think I bonded with her in The Mystery in Arizona when she was struggling with math. :

It still amazes me that years and years and hundreds and hundreds of books later, I could still recall the first six Trixie Belden volumes quite vividly even though I stopped reading the series in my early teens and didn't pick it up again until…um, a couple of decades later. That didn't happen with any of my other childhood reading (or much adult reading, for that matter), although there were surely other books I enjoyed.

I guess I am in the minority in that I noticed the difference in authorship right away and didn't care for any of the Kathryn Kenny volumes. In my own writing, I sort of pick and choose among events and details the KK's added.

You can find out more about my "universes," such as they are, on the Stories page: http://sleepysidezone.com/stories.html. At heart, I'm a semi-traditionalist, in that I am a confirmed believer in the Jim/Trixie pairing. Be warned, however, that while I believe that Jim and Trixie "really" wind up together, I don't necessarily write that in my stories. And, I have no real attachment to the other male/female Bob-White pairings.

Thanks for reading and visiting my Trixie site!