Phyllis Wachob grew up in the Central Valley of California, loving to read and use her imagination. After college at UC Santa Cruz, she began a career of travel and adventure, studying for an MA in England, traveling by bicycle through France and Italy, and then busing through Greece and Turkey. While trying to settle to life in California, working at a desk in an office, she stretched even further during vacations to Asia and beyond. She then became a fulltime traveler and writer, spending a year in India, followed by a year traveling in Africa. She has continued to travel throughout her life and has to date, traveled to 81 countries.
English teaching as a profession was embraced during a spell in China, where she fell in love with the wild scenery and peoples of Chinese Turkestan. She subsequently lived in Japan, Taiwan, Australia (where she earned a Doctorate of Education in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), China, Singapore, Egypt and Turkey, teaching and traveling. These extensive experiences are reflected in her mystery novels in the Teachers Abroad Mystery series. She took her knowledge of the people, places, food and customs and wove fictional stories of mystery and murder. After coming back to live in Bakersfield, she also wrote the Kern Kapers Mystery series, based on places and people in her hometown.
She has been influenced by the great mystery writers, (although she started with the Nancy Drew mysteries), enjoying Sherlock Homes and Agatha Christie’s books among others. She believes that characters and their vicissitudes form the crux of mysteries and the motivation to solve the whodunit is the driver of the story. The colorful, exotic, and unfamiliar should draw the reader into the core of the mystery, while the mundane and conventional hold the keys to the solution.
Currently she resides in an active retirement community in Walnut Creek, California. She is a member of the Published Writers of Rossmoor and of the Mt. Diablo Branch of the California Writer’s Club. These professional writing communities give her invaluable connections to other writers and help her expand her networks. She is currently working on a memoir, weaving stories of travel and life experiences.