Lillian Stewart Carl

After growing up in Missouri and Ohio and spending many years in North Texas, I've developed a passion for mountains and oceans, particularly the ones in Scotland, which is heaven's front porch and which I visit as often as possible. I've been lucky enough to travel to other parts of Europe, the Middle East, Japan, India, and Down Under.
Lillian at the Texas Scottish Festival with musician Brian McNeill

(Brian is the inspiration for the character of Hugh Munro in the Fairbairn/Cameron mystery series, a liberty he's taken with great good humor)

While I've worked a few "real" jobs, as an engineering aide, a librarian, a newspaper columnist, and a college history teacher, all along I was writing stories and critiques first for my desk drawer and then for fan magazines. My first professional fiction was published in the Amazons II anthology.
My husband is a retired geophysicist. Our two adult sons are in advertising and computers respectively. We have a cat and an assortment of houseplants I view as rentals -- how long can I keep them before they die? Our home is a tract house cleverly disguised as a book-lined cloister.
My hobbies (or what I do when I'm trying to avoid working) include needlepoint and knitting, gardening, public television, walking and tai chi, and crossword puzzles. I love music, particularly Celtic folk/rock, classical and ancient, and I can play many of the Lord of the Rings movie themes on the piano.
Lillian with Tony Christiansen at the Miner's Cottage house museum in Charters Towers, Queensland, Australia. Tony showed Lillian the best ghost video she's ever seen, made in that very room!
(Reflective patches on his shirt are catching the flashbulb; he's not glowing ghostfully himself.)
Unlike more methodical writers, I never sat up one day and said, "I'm going to start writing now". I've always written, just as I've always read. Just as I've always breathed, for that matter. And I've been aided and abetted since the age of twelve by my best friend, science fiction writer Lois McMaster Bujold.
If I could be anything other than a writer (as if!) I'd probably be a librarian.
Over the years I've been inventing my own genre, mystery/romance with supernatural/ historical/ mythological underpinnings. And I've become a firm believer in the odd synchronies of the writing life. Soon after finishing Ashes to Ashes, for example, which is about a woman from Missouri named Rebecca working in a replica of a Scottish castle, I visited the real castle and discovered the tour guide was a woman from Oklahoma named Rebecca.
I am a member or former member of SFWA, Novelists, Inc., and The Author's Guild.

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