Today I have another guest author visiting Alive & Knitting. Deanna Chase is another member of RWA Online, and also another writer who gets arty on the side. (I am insanely jealous that she lives near New Orleans.)

I’m also visiting Deanna’s blog today, talking about going back in time. (Virtually, not actually.) Here’s the permalink to my post.

Please welcome Deanna!

Hello everyone! It’s really fun to visit another creative blog where craft and words come together. While Deb spends much of her time weaving romantic fantasy tales and knitting, I spend my days writing paranormal romance and making glass beads. It seems creative people can never really stick to one thing can they?

I’m Deanna Chase, debut author of Haunted on Bourbon Street. Thanks, Deb, for hosting me today. My journey with writing didn’t start out as a child longing to be a writer. Sure, I loved books. I even wrote a few stories and dreamed I’d be famous one day. But I’m pretty sure that lasted only about a weekend.

I’ve been a dedicated reader most of my life (except in college when I worked and went to school full-time). Who doesn’t love getting swept away in an excellent story? However, I never believed I was all that creative. In high school and college I was a typical jock. Basketball and volleyball were my whole life.

Then I met Greg, the man I would one day call my husband. He is an artist through and through. You name the medium and likely he’s tried it. When we got together he was heavily into stained glass. It was cool, but we lived in a studio apartment, and the windows he worked on took up the entire living room. It was normal to wipe your feet before bed to be sure you weren’t contaminating the sheets with tiny glass shards. Ouch!

So in late 1999 when we met a glass bead maker (also called lampworker—an old fashioned term from when artists used to melt glass over an oil lamp), and the hubby changed mediums. I was thrilled. A torch, a kiln, and a handful of glass rods later, saved me from slivers of glass in the bed.

It wasn’t until 2003 when the Greg convinced me is was a good idea to sell our house, quit our jobs, and travel around the country full-time, that I became interested in lampworking. Suddenly I had free time and the energy to concentrate on something other than the day job. Oh, we still worked. We made ends met by working seasonal campground jobs in different parts of the US. But they were all part-time, affording us time to sight-see and explore whatever passions we might have.

Greg set up a portable studio in the RV and I learned to make glass beads. It was really hard for me to abandon my noncreative image of myself. But soon I was making beads good enough to sell, and in 2005 we stopped working at campgrounds and made lampworking our full-time business. Of course it wasn’t all roses and chocolates. If you’ve ever had experience with an RV, you know that when one person gets up and moves around the whole thing moves. Imagine trying to do intricate work in a two-thousand-degree flame with hot glass while your studio is shaking.

Not good. Not good at all. This meant the person who was not working either had to leave the RV or stay still. This is when I started writing. I had plenty of time at the computer while waiting for my turn at the torch. That was over six years ago.

Since then we have settled into a house outside of New Orleans where we have a nice stable studio. We traveled for just under five years. That one decision changed our entire lives. At first it just started out as a temporary adventure. We always figured we’d settle down somewhere and get real jobs again. But it turned into something we never expected. We now work from home running own our own glass business and I’ve found a passion for writing.

Haunted on Bourbon Street is a paranormal romance set in the French Quarter of New Orleans. It is available on Amazon US, Amazon UK, B&N, iBooks, All Romance, and Smashwords.

Jade loves her new apartment–until a ghost joins her in the shower.

When empath Jade Calhoun moves into an apartment above a strip bar on Bourbon Street, she expects life to get interesting. What she doesn’t count on is making friends with an exotic dancer, attracting a powerful spirit, and developing feelings for Kane, her sexy landlord.

Being an empath has never been easy on Jade’s relationships. It’s no wonder she keeps her gift a secret. But when the ghost moves from spooking Jade to terrorizing Pyper, the dancer, it’s up to Jade to use her unique ability to save her. Except she’ll need Kane’s help–and he’s betrayed her with a secret of his own–to do it. Can she find a way to trust him and herself before Pyper is lost?

Deanna’s bead store

Deanna’s Blog