Phyllis and her husband, Gerald (Jiggs), have been happily married for 57 years. For the first 33 years of that time, she was a full-time wife and mother heavily involved in raising their six children and active in school, community, and church activities. It was a busy and productive life and Phyllis enjoyed it, but when the two youngest children became teenagers, she started looking around for something to occupy her time once they no longer needed her full attention.

She’d always been an avid reader, and, as many other readers have, often thought she could have written the story better. When she learned that the Adult Education Department in Sacramento sponsored a class in creative writing she enrolled, and in a very short time came to realize that she’d found what she hoped would be her second career.

It took almost three years of writing classes, critique groups, and rejection slips before Phyllis made her first sale, to the confession magazine market. During the next two years she had 38 confessions published, and in 1980, she sold her first novel, a Silhouette Romance titled Temporary Bride.