Celia D. Hayes

I grew up in a far suburb of Los Angeles, the oldest in a family of four children, the offspring of a research biologist and an artist in stained glass, which eccentric family experience formed the basis for my memoir "Our Grandpa Was An Alien" (Booklocker, 2004).
After earning a professionally useless degree in English Literature (California State University Northridge, 1976) an un-slaked taste for adventure, foreign travel (and a regular paycheck) led me to enlist in the United States Air Force, where I trained as a radio and television broadcast specialist, and served for twenty years in places as various as Greece, Spain, Japan, Korea, Greenland and Ogden, Utah, in a wide assortment of duties and pleasures which included midnight alt-rock DJ, TV news anchor, video-production librarian, radio and television writer and producer, production manager, tour guide and driving a bright orange Volvo sedan from Athens to Zaragoza, Spain, accompanied only by a small and cranky child. I retired from the Air Force in 1997, and began working for various small firms in San Antonio as an office manager, administrative assistant and executive secretary.
In 2002, I was bored with all that, and became a regular contributor to the military-oriented weblog, "Sgt. Stryker's Daily Brief" (now "The Daily Brief") at writing essays and commentary on matters historical, personal, political, cultural, literary and military. One thing led to another, and I got hooked on writing historical fiction, bringing out "To Truckee's Trail" in 2006; that's the story of the first ever wagon-train party to bring wagons over the Sierra Nevada, which marked the opening of the California Trail. Besides historical novels, I review books and movies for Blogger News Network, am also on the board of the Independent Authors Guild, a non-profit association of writers published by small and regional publishers ... and I manage their website, also. I also edit and write for the historical fiction section of the on-line fiction magazine "TheDeepening"
I currently live in San Antonio with my daughter and an assortment of dogs and cats, and travel within Texas doing lectures and talks about my follow-up novel series, the Adelsverein Trilogy.