Libbie Martin, marketer by day, writer by night (and weekends), an obsessive-compulsive over-achieving perfectionist with control freak tendencies …
“I grew up on Air Force bases, which could be why I’m slightly OCD (okay, no cracks about the word “slightly” over there). Books and writing became my way of dealing with constant moves and the scrutiny showered on an officer’s kid. When my parents divorced, I was 13. We moved from Anchorage, Alaska to San Francisco. I was 13, just into junior high school, thrown into a cosmopolitan world I’d never experienced. Books again became my world.
After graduating from UOP in Stockton, with a BAIS in International Studies and what we used to call an M.R.S. degree, I spent the next 14 years raising my three daughters and playing suburban housewife.
Then my girls grew up, and it was no longer cool to be the daughter of the room mom or worse, substitute. “Empty nest syndrome” was ready to ambush me, so I returned to school to get a master’s degree in History. My subbing days had shown me how much I love to tell people what to do – I mean, teach. But while at Sac State, I needed an outlet for the eight hours I was on campus every day – a two-hour commute isn’t conducive to going home for lunch, and as my daughters put it, even I couldn’t study that much. So I went to the school newspaper hoping they’d make me a gofer and maybe give me a chance to write once in a while.
They made me an editor; I changed my major and the rest is history.
When I’m not writing and editing proposals or other geotechnical/science-related stuff for work or histories and biographies for local heroes,
I write emergency plans for small businesses and health-care organizations, create scrapbooks for my grandchildren, read and review books for the local paper, and occasionally read something just for fun.
I live in Fairbanks, Alaska, with my mom and my crazy husky-heeler mix Calypso, and provide volunteer labor for the Yukon Quest, Red Cross, and Fairbanks Dog Park.
