Charity Tahmaseb grew up in the small southern Minnesota town of Mankato. Like another native Mankato writer, Maud Hart Lovelace, she knew at age five that she wanted to write.

After majoring in Russian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and receiving her commission as a second lieutenant, she went on active duty in the Army. During the next five years, she jumped out of airplanes, lived in Germany, deployed to Desert Storm, and married a dashing artillery officer.

During that time, writing was never far away. She wrote intelligence summaries, maintenance procedures, operations orders, along with an intelligence report she no longer has the security clearance to read.

When she left the Army, her first civilian job was as a documentation specialist, i.e., writer. She now works as a contract technical writer for a medical device company in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Some women put off writing until the kids are grown, but her children, ages 8 and 2, inspire her. Granted, she doesn’t get as many hours at the keyboard as she might like, but these two have a knack for helping her when she needs it most. Her daughter was born the day after Charity completed the second draft of her second novel, India Charlie.

Since Charity began to write fiction six months after her son was born (about the time he began sleeping through the night), she gauges her progress by his age. When she gets discouraged, she reminds myself that, in writer’s years, she’s only entering third grade.

Read an excerpt from India Charlie.