Bernadette Pajer courtesy Alexa Rae Photography

Bernadette loves the Pacific Northwest. She spent her childhood in Seattle, surrounded by beautiful mountains, listening to KJR (which played top 40 hits back then), and daydreaming (the first stage of writing). After high school, she studied pre-engineering at the University of Washington for two years before love—and a growing awareness that she was indifferent to Differential Equations—intervened. Newly wed, she and her husband moved to Orcas Island where the idea of being a writer took hold. She was working at the local bank when she met one of the island’s most famous residents, Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. She’s sure he doesn’t remember the occasion, but she recalls clearly how very kind he was. She told him she was thinking of writing, and he smiled gently and told her not to think, do. Writers write.

She began to write. And write. And submit, and wait, and write. Fast forward a decade, past dozens of rejections and a growing pile of manuscripts, and she returned to the UW to take a Creative Writing Certificate course, where she met fellow writers who are very dear to her today. In 2001, she decided to complete her degree at the UW at the Bothell campus. Her focus was on Culture, Literature and the Arts. It was during spring break of her final quarter that her son, at last, was born.

When she returned to writing fiction, she discovered that her heart and her passions were encapsulated in characters she’d created years earlier. Professor Bradshaw, his son Justin, Mrs. Prouty, Henry Pratt, and Missouri Fremont. She knew, after her long writing journey, that her writing home belonged with them, at 1204 Gallagher in Seattle. In the Professor Bradshaw Mystery Series, she happily explores the early days of the turn of the last century, a wondrous time when the race was on to discover and invent—everything—including the very same radio that some 70 years later carried music to a daydreaming teen.

THE FIRST TIME is a time travel romance released May 15, 2015 by Backyard Press.

As a Citizen Journalist, Bernadette explores issues of medicine and healing.