Carol Kerney Books

Welcome to Carol Kerney Books! May I introduce myself? I’m Carol Kerney. I’m a teacher, writer, parent, and grandmother. One of my best buds is a wild and crazy mixed-breed dog named Rudi. We have to be very careful when we open the garage door because Rudi has figured out how to time the instant the garage door to the house and the garage door to the world have opened. And she makes the Great Escape. How she loves to dash through the neighborhood with us chasing her! She never runs away from home though. That dog knows a good thing when she sees it.

My husband Bill and I live in a condominium in San Diego, California. Bill is tall, handsome, and athletic and, beyond a doubt, the most creative, innovative, and ingenious person I’ve ever known. His background is military and business. Okay, yes, he may be turning eighty this month, but there’s no rocking chair for that man. He’s actively in the process of starting a charter school to focus on sports science. He grew up in Indiana, and I grew up in Texas. So we compromised on Southern California. We’ve been married for 47 years. 

I’ve known I wanted to be writer since I was a child. Perhaps it’s because my mother was a storyteller. Or maybe it’s because I stumbled onto Robert A. Heinlein’s wonderful juvenile novels when I was twelve (although I don’t care for a lot of his adult books—ugh!) Getting sick when I was fourteen played a big role. I could no longer walk home, so I received special permission to hang out in the library until my parents picked me up. It was a brand new school library and those rows and rows of fresh books called to me. I recognized that those colorful covers contained treasure after treasure. I also realized I wanted to write books to go on those alluring shelves.

I decided early I wanted to be a teacher. My mom wanted to be a teacher, but right after high school, her father, a lawyer, tapped her to become his secretary. Mother didn’t have much choice in the matter since it was the heart of the Great Depression. But true to her look-on-the-bright side nature, she made the best of her career. She ended up being private secretary to the director of the parachute department at NASA. She was thrilled to work 18 hours per day on Apollo 11 when mankind first set foot on the Moon! My mother was blessed with a wonderful Latin name bestowed on her by her German parents: Concordia Augusta Scriba.

I enjoy gentle and subtle humor. My father, Raymond Cecil McMillan, was a true-blue Texan. Although his Scots-Irish family had arrived in the American colonies before we were a country, during one of those Scottish migrations in the 1700s, somehow he maintained a sly and understated British humor. Never the life of the party or the big joke teller, you had to listen to him carefully. And when you did that, you quickly learned that he was a very funny man! An intelligent inventive man, he built ships during World War Two, worked as a sheet metal mechanic at one of the world’s largest construction companies, and enjoyed his stints as a farmer and rancher.

We’ll leave my children, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren for another day. Suffice it to say, I think they are splendid, one and all! 

In summary, I love teaching, I love writing, and I love my family, my church, and my country.

Carol Kerney
Carol Kerney Books
carolkerneybooks@gmail.com