About Author Renée Gardner I was born in Philadelphia and had loving parents, an older sister who tolerated me, and a fairly normal childhood except: I ruined my tap dancing recital by tap, tap, tapping off the stage after I discovered that I didn't know the steps to the Little Farmerettes' dance. The worst part of the fiasco was that all the other five-year-olds followed right behind me barely five seconds into our routine. At six-years-old, I had diphtheria which kept me out of school so long that I missed learning the basics of reading. Even with the help of a tutor, I couldn't read well until I was in the third grade. Then there was the time that my sister left me as security at a local ice cream parlor after she discovered that she didn't have enough money to pay for our ice cream sodas. If you are about to launch your writing career, benefit from my experiences: 1) Write what you know, either through personal knowledge or research, but never assume that you are the foremost authority on any subject. When I was a college freshman, I had to write a research paper. It could be on any topic I chose. The only stipulation was that it be the proper length and included footnotes as well as a bibliography. I decided to write about "The Development of the Ballet in the United States," primarily because I knew a lot about the subject -- after my tap dancing debacle, I took ballet for many years and became interested in labonotation, which is the method of recording dance movements through symbolic notations. I also naively assumed that my big, husky instructor didn't know anything about ballet. Wrong! He was a balletomane. When my graded paper was returned, I discovered a "B" at the top of the first page plus his scrawled comment, "It would have rated an "A," if you had done more research. 2) While you're waiting for you book to be published write short stories, articles, interviews - anything that will get your name in print. I did all of the above and established a nice list of writing credentials long before The Tap Dancing Gorilla was published. 3) Join writers' organizations like Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime. Both fine groups offer many benefits including newsletters, writing advice, symposiums, local chapter events, the opportunity to meet published writers, and much more. You can find their websites on my Useful Links page. Unlike diphtheria, the writing bug didn't bite me until I was an adult. I attended Temple University in Philadelphia where I was a business major with a minor in retailing. It took just six months as buyer-in-training at Bonwit Teller to convince me that I'd rather shop than sell, so there went that career. After short-term jobs at an advertising agency, a travel agency and a philanthropic agency, I moved to New York and got a job at a public relations agency. It took barely a year for me to work my way up from a secretary to the assistant to a wonderful woman who doubled as the Fashion Director and Director of the Television/Radio Department. When she retired to Ireland, I was promoted to her job and traveled to fashion "shoots" in Barbados, Aruba, Ireland and other exotic places. I also booked client spokespersons media tours and accompanied them when they made appearances outside of New York City. The job was so wonderful that I wrote From: Secretary To: Executive, a humorous how-to book for secretaries who aspired to climb the corporate ladder. But the book never hit the bookstores, because by the time I finished writing it, young women didn't have to follow my path to success. They came out of college with the degrees that gave them instant access to the executive suite. After the P.R. agency was swallowed by a bigger agency, I concluded that another career change was called for, and I became the assistant to the president of an electronic ticketing company. I was happy, until the day he announced that he was moving the business to Los Angeles. "Will you come with me?" he asked. "No," said I, so he said, "Tah tah." During the next six months, he spent one week a month in New York and the rest of the time in LA, while every day I went to an empty office to open the mail, answer the telephone and write and sign checks. (I learned to forge his signature so well that when he signed an occasional check, the bank refused to honor it.) With so much downtime, I decided to write another book, only this time it would be fiction. The Legacy was a sweeping novel that traced the lives of four beautiful young women from different parts of the world who are raised in a fancy brothel in Hong Kong prior to the city's return to the control of the Communist Chinese government. (Don't ask.) The book sounded like a bestseller to me. The only problem was that I couldn't get beyond writing the first draft and ultimately the book collapsed like a punctured balloon. There were several reasons for the early demise of The Legacy. The main one being that a two-week vacation spent in "The Pearl of the Orient" didn't qualify me as an authority on prostitutes, brothels or the exotic delights offered in them. I also hadn't a clue in the world as to how to get rid of a body. I thought that stuffing the remains of a nasty eunuch inside a life-size statue was a nifty way to make him disappear. Alas, a savvier friend pointed out that the decomposing body would give off such a stench that everyone within smelling range of the statue would know where to find him. By the time I discovered that I was incapable of writing a far-reaching saga peppered with heavy doses of sex and intrigue, I was out of a job. But, to quote a character in The Tap Dancing Gorilla, "… when one door closes, another one opens." And so it was for me. My husband retired from one job and immediately began a new career that allowed me to stay home and write a book about something I knew -- New York City. The Tap Dancing Gorilla is set on Manhattan's Upper East Side, were my husband and I lived until the beginning of August 2005, when he retired from his second career and we moved to beautiful Southwest Florida. Although I love my new life, New York holds the key to my heart and Philadelphia is the place I call home. If you have any questions about The Tap Dancing Gorilla or this website, e-mail me at Rgumby2@aol.com. I promise that I'll answer you. And The Dog Took the Cat, the second book in the Sutton Place Mystery series, will be out shortly.