Katherine was born in San Francisco, CA, and
has lived in the Bay Area, San
Diego, the Central Valley, and currently Orange County, residing in Tustin, CA.
Katherine has always been a writer. In her youth, to escape reality, she
told stories, mostly to herself, and watched movies. She tried her hand at short story writing and received
praise from the teacher but was frustrated by the shortness of the form.
After traveling to Europe for the first time (3 months by
backpack) in 1977, she got the travel bug. She trained as a travel agent, which lasted about 8 months
before she realized the job was boring and really low pay, so she went on to
corporate as an administrator.
In 1979, she had a flash: write a travel book based on her
European travels. In 1980, she
self-published Tips for Women Travelers
and sold it through classified ads in women’s magazines. (This was pre-Internet.) And she wrote travel articles, her
first published work after the book.
During the 1980s, she continued to self-publish about
travel, and in 1990 shifted gears to writers, creating a series of how-to books
called Focus Your Energies on… Plot, Characters, Writing for Children and Teens, and others. In 1992,
Children’s Book Insider published a reworking of Focus Your Energies
on Writing for Children and Teens as CBI
In-depth, a series of workbooks. This series is in 2nd edition, available from
Write4kids.com.
In the late 1980s, she also tried her hand at writing
mainstream, historical novels, but found them too long. Then she discovered adolescent novels (150
pages), more to her sensibilities.
She wrote House of Time, a time
travel adventure featuring 13-year-old girls. Although rejected (with praise) by a major publisher, she
continued to write.
Finally running in frustration from her administrative job,
she enrolled in the MA in English-Composition program at San Francisco State
University in 1991, graduating in 1994.
With her Master’s degree, she accepted a teaching position
at Modesto Junior College, Modesto, CA, and other colleges; the next year, she
began at California State University Stanislaus (Turlock, CA), teaching writing
and business communications until 2002.
She also wrote two textbooks, published by NTC/Contemporary Publishing,
later bought by McGraw Hill. Simplified
Paragraph Skills and Simplified
Essay Skills are currently available on
Amazon.com.
By 1997, after realizing that novels weren’t her forte, she
changed to screenwriting. It was
perfect. Scripts are 120 pages and
focus more on plot and dialogue.
Over the next few years, she read more than 50 books on screenwriting
(getting more and more confused) and wrote. Her first screenplay, Castle Rising, 1997, was a semi-disaster, but it was her
first. For her second screenplay
in 1998, she converted her novel House of Time into a screenplay, which placed in a screenwriting
contest in 1998.
Of course, once into the process, she realized how
complicated writing a screenplay really was, but by then, she was hooked, and
she kept writing. Over the next
few years, while teaching college writing, she wrote several more screenplays.
By screenplay #5, Douglas and Daughter, Private Investigators, her screenplays reached finalist levels, which she
found encouraging.
In August 2002, she moved from Modesto, CA, to Tustin, CA,
and joined the younger students at Chapman University (Orange,
CA) in the Master’s in Fine Arts in Screenwriting program. For two years, she was in heaven. She wrote two screenplays, Captain’s
Inn I: Captain Mike’s Treasure (the first
of a trilogy of family films), and Woman’s Advantage, both of which were accepted and published in the
juried Killer Script list.
During her last semester at Chapman in 2004, she trained as
a script supervisor for film production, thinking she didn’t want to teach any
longer. She started production
work in January 2005 and worked as a script supervisor for a 1.5 years until
she realized that being a script supervisor was not her bag. But she was astonished at how much she
learned while on set, working with actors, directors, and crew. These lessons improved her
screenwriting.
She also did some consulting work with a small studio and a
few screenwriters on their projects.
She thoroughly enjoyed the process and got thankful comments from
clients. She presented private workshops
for writers and self-publishers.
She returned to teaching composition at Saddleback College (Mission
Viejo, CA) for a year, and in 2007 started at California State University
Fullerton (Fullerton, CA) in business communications, where she currently
teaches.
In the summer of 2007, she wrote Shirley Holmes, a light-hearted murder mystery. Through several
years and several versions, Shirley had aged from 13 to 50. In 2007, Shirley Holmes went out to a contest, with no results. In 2008, Katherine drastically revised Shirley
Holmes and submitted it to another
contest. She’s still waiting for
results on that one.
In May of 2008, she got a flash of an idea for a “reality
show” adventure screenplay called Ghost House, which is still in process and going well.
During the summer of 2008, while on summer recess from her
teaching, she wrote several e-books about
writing nonfiction books and time travel, based on her workshops and webinars
(through businessexpertwebinars.com). (See ploegersservices.com for
descriptions.)
Currently, Katherine is a writer/editor/publisher,
teacher/trainer, writing coach and script consultant. She lives and works in Tustin, CA.
