Lorra Laven

I started writing professionally in the mid‑eighties, working as a technical writer, creating user‑guides and developing classes for newbie, computer users. My column, As the Diskette Turns, was my response to being forced to write a bi-monthly newsletter covering the latest developments in computer hardware and software, a yawningly boring topic to anyone who wasn't a computer engineer. I began writing novels in 2001, optioning the film rights on the first novel, Secrets of an All-Boys' Prep School, to an independent filmmaker, Silverfilm Productions. (Best Known Project - Crossing Delancey.) Alas, the screenwriter never found a buyer.

I have completed the first draft of my third novel tentatively titled, Pendulum, a story inspired by recent reports of family annihilators and loosely based on a harrowing real‑life experience. Like Ann Rule who found herself sitting beside Ted Bundy and later wrote "The Stranger Beside Me," I was a repeat victim of the one they called the Mudder, a clandestine figure who squeezed through amazingly small openings on his sixty‑plus nighttime home invasions. Among the Mudder's many bizarre rituals was his use of bodily fluids to make mud that he then spread in women's undergarments and raincoats. Another favorite -- which caused many a sleepless night for me -- was his penchant for watching women while they slept.

Alas the Mudder was never caught, but the break‑ins stopped the day he moved out of his childhood home. (Oh, did I mention that his house was directly across the street from mine?) From what I was able to learn from neighbors, the Mudder had a Sybil‑type relationship with his mother. Although the break‑ins happened many years ago, I put off writing the story until I could confirm the Mudder had died. For to do otherwise would have been unthinkably terrifying.

I am currently starting research and a rough outline for a fourth novel: Relevant. Pitch: When sixty‑something, well-to-do widows, who are lifelong friends, realize they have become virtually invisible to their children and to society at large, they meet over cocktails to plot their return to relevance.

Before college, I apprenticed at a repertory theatre in the Midwest, appearing in productions with the late Margaret Hamilton (The Wicked Witch of the West) who, as it turns out, was neither green nor mean. After completing my BS, I returned to the theater, appearing in regional productions and commercials and hosting a children's television show for the local NBC affiliate while earning a real living working in a chemistry lab.

And then there's my artistic side, the part of me that resisted writing dry, technical articles. I retired from the theater to raise my three sons, resuming my piano studies at a conservatory and completing graduate‑level courses in chemistry and genetics. In an effort to stay sane, I continued working from home as a technical writer and chemistry tutor. I continue concertizing as time allows while dreaming of my triumphant return to the stage. (That's a joke!)