Enough About Joyce Krieg

(Pronounced KREEG -- it's German)

I made the scene at the mid-point of the 20th Century, in a medium-size town in the middle of America. Fortunately, those circumstances didn’t last long. Thanks to the whims of the military and the vagaries of the civilian job market, my family moved to California, finally ending up in the South Bay, just before it morphed into Silicon Valley.

The Fifties

Like many kids with too much imagination and too few social skills, my closest childhood friends were the heroines in the books I devoured, and the disk jockeys I listened to when I wasn't reading. In those days, there were no female role models on the radio, but I thought I might have a shot at being the next Carolyn Keene or Laura Ingalls Wilder. Could there be anything more exciting and magical than having strangers actually wanting to read the stories you made up and wrote down?

The Sixties

But it’s not realistic to expect a gal to support herself making up stories and writing them down for other folks to read. I grew up, got practical, and decided upon graduation from Blackford High School that journalism would at least give me the chance to write and earn a living. After graduating from J-school at San Jose State, I landed a reporting job at the Woodland (CA) Daily Democrat. I learned how to produce readable copy on a deadline, a skill that would serve me well in the coming years.

The Seventies

Meanwhile, the women’s movement was prying open the locked doors into the world of commercial broadcasting. I rekindled my early fascination with radio, began hanging around Northern California’s legendary Earth Radio 102, learned how to talk into a mike and run a broadcast board, earned a First Class RadioTelephone License, and clawed my way into a news anchor job at Sacramento’s KFBK NewsTalk 1530. I expanded that into a gig as the staff announcer at the local PBS station, and even hosted a few pledge drives (but don’t hold that against me).

The Eighties

The chance to enter the ranks of management was too good to pass up, and I became KFBK’s Promotion Manager. Those were exciting days to be involved in radio: talk was just starting to break through as a major format, and KFBK was consistently the market’s top-rated and top-billing station. I won a slew of awards, including Sacramento Public Relations Professional of the Year. I kept so busy, I all but forgot about that childhood dream to be a writer.

The Nineties

Corporate merger-mania hit the industry, and I became the first victim of consolidation . I moved to the beach (Pacific Grove) and began jotting down ideas for a mystery novel based on my experiences in radio. During those years of writing and rewriting, submission and rejection, I supported myself with a variety of day jobs: Christmas gift-wrapper at Macy's, copywriter and researcher for a dealer in celebrity and historic autographs, ticket-taker at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, technical writer for a software company, and paralegal, among others.

The Oh-Ohs

With nothing to show for my years of writing except a pile of rejection slips, I pretty much gave up on that mystery I wrote about talk radio. Then one day while Web surfing, I ran across a notice about a contest sponsored by St. Martin's Press and Malice Domestic to find the "Best First Traditional Mystery." I figured I'd give it one last try, entered the novel that would become Murder Off Mike in the contest, and damn if I didn't win! You can find out more about the contest at the section I set up For Writers Only. All I can say is, success is definitely sweeter for having waited so long.

*So how is it that I can claim to be the very first victim of the corporate consolidations? In 1993, I was working for KFBK in Sacramento when our owner, Westinghouse (Group W Radio) put us on the block. We were purchased by a brand-new outfit in Texas called Chancellor, basically a bunch of venture capitalists. My station was their very first purchase, and I was the very first employee they laid off (or, didn't offer employment to--same difference!). Chancellor eventually got bought by an outfit called AMFM, which a few years later got swallowed up by, you guessed it, Clear Channel. So you could say, I was the very first radio person to get ejected from the industry by the corporate clones. I'm afraid I won't be the last . . .

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