I have two signing coming up:

Clues Unlimited
3146 East Fort Lowell Road
Tucson AZ 85716
Saturday, August 21st at 2:00 PM

Atalanta Music and Books
38 Main St.
Bisbee, AZ  85603
Saturday, August 28 at 1:00 pm

A Song for You has been nominated for the Simon & Schuster Mary Higgins Clark award. Award winners will be announced this spring at the The 63rd Annual Edgars Awards Banquet in New York City

The date of my book signing at Clues Unlimited has changed to Saturday, November 1st at 2pm. (it had been scheduled for October 4th)

I have a signing at Atalanta Books, 132 Main Street, Bisbee, Az on Saturday, October 25 at 1pm.

I have a signing at Poisoned Pen, in Scottsdale, Az on Saturday October 11 at 2pm.

I was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, the oldest of four children. When I was a child my father’s job took the family to Europe for four years in the Fifties, where we enjoyed the advantages of an extremely favorable currency exchange, so my sister Alix and I were able to attend a fancy elementary school for girls in London, Lady Eden’s and had classmates with Honorables in front of their names.. We then moved to Paris where we attended Cours Ste. Genevieve, a not so fancy French elementary school where we learned grammatically flawed Parisian playground French. Coming back to the States as spoiled brats, we were then forced to return to ordinary life.

I graduated from college with a degree in English, married and lived in New York City, where my son Alex was born at St. Vincent’s Hospital in the Village. I later moved to Venice California, where I worked as a story analyst for ABC Pictures, met my second husband, an artist, and moved to Europe. We lived in Rome for a while, then moved to a small Greek Island, Skopelos where we lived for two years and where, having nothing else to do, I began to write seriously for the first time.

Eventually, after a stint in New York City, we moved to Bisbee, Arizona, which was just getting a reputation as an artist community and bought a house for five thousand dollars. I ran Cochise Fine Arts, a community arts center there and also wrote some reviews for ArtSpace Magazine. Eventually I got a job as a Victim Advocate with the Cochise County Attorney’s office. A victim advocate helps victims of violent crime through the criminal justice system and being a victim advocate was probably the most interesting and meaningful job I have ever had. It brought me in touch with a wide range of people in crisis, when people are at their most honest and taught me as much about life as any journey to a foreign land ever could.

My main sources of amusement are my two orange cats; Patrick and Angel Baby. (I dedicated my fourth book to Patrick) and a defense attorney who is very good at home repair..

It looks like betsythornton.com is now indexed by Google, see:

http://www.google.com/search?q=betsy+thornton

-Alex

As promised, I have made a dark theme, is essentially a variation of the original Open Road theme, using the same header image to which I added a neon glow filter and some lightning (sort of like “day for night“)

This site is finally up and running. Not sure I like the theme, may tweak it a bit, may change it completely. Much depends on what my mother, Betsy Thornton, for whom the theme was designed, thinks of it.

I essentially scoured the WordPress theme sites for interesting themes that I could use as a starting point. I wanted a fixed width site with the header flush to the top of the page. I also wanted drop shadowed edges and to be able to have portions of my header image float over this edge. Finally, I wanted to have a simple patterned background image that would repeat nicely.

In terms of colors and actual graphics, I initially wanted to do a dark theme so I could then use the cover for A Whole New Life which depicts a car driving down a road a night with lightning in the background. However I had a hard time finding a portion of that cover that would look right as a header. Also tried portions of other book covers, many of which also have dark compositions, but had the same problem. That said I haven’t given up on the dark theme possibilities…

Still, thinking more about the site, I wasn’t sure it would make sense to associate it graphically with one particular book cover. Thus, this theme was an attempt to abstract out ideas from all the novels as well as perhaps something of the author. One graphic element I did take from a couple of book covers was the circular text.

-Alex