About Shannon
After gaining recognition in sixth grade when her best friend set her poem to music and accompanied her on the autoharp, Shannon Baker thought she was destined for a writing career. Sadly, her older sister explained that she’d already claimed the title of writer of the family and Shannon would have to do something else.
Always an obedient child, Baker shifted her attention elsewhere, but never truly quit writing. She graduated from the University of Nebraska in Lincoln (Go Big Red) with a shiny business degree, and made the questionable decision to marry a rancher and move to the isolation of the Nebraska Sandhills.
Even being the outdoorsy type who liked to cycle and ski and recreate, needing to don eighteen layers during a blizzard, then climb into a saddle to bring in a herd of heavies (that’s pregnant cattle to you city-folk) took some getting used to. Nevertheless, Baker grew to love the beauty and quirkiness of her new home. Though trying hard not to write—now because her mother-in-law was firmly against it taking too much time away from the family—Baker somehow couldn’t keep from penning columns for a weekly farm and ranch journal, and features for a regional newspaper, all while working on truly awful novels.
Back to that original questionable decision, not questionable was welcoming two amazing daughters with the rancher. But said rancher jumped the pasture fence fifteen years into the union and Baker quit him and the Sandhills. She made a new life in Boulder, Colorado, where she finally put that business degree to work as operations director of a medical device start up. This time she shelved her writing while she earned an MBA.
But the pesky urge to tell stories couldn’t be silenced and again bit her hard. With her children raised, a fresh new husband who supported her writing, and only a day job to interfere, Baker was finally able to write to her heart’s content.
It took Baker too many years to prove that she was the writer of the family. But she published her first book, one that is happily and forever out of print. She’s doggedly continued to publish, despite nearly daily announcements she’s giving up writing forever. (It’s hard and she’s basically lazy.)
And weirdly, a bit of the Sandhills sand sifted into her veins all those years ago and became the Kate Fox series, which keeps Baker connected to those cattle, whether she likes it or not.
After settling in Tucson, Baker wrote a couple of books in the world of the Border Patrol, and crafted a disturbingly dark suspense novel, while continuing to throw Kate Fox into one dangerous situation after another.
While Kate Fox is going strong (with some exciting news maybe on the horizon), Baker is still whining and writing books with new characters. And it’s still hard. And she is never going to write another one. She means it this time. She’s done.
No more…
