People often ask me how I got started writing. I had the good fortune of being the obstetrician for Dr. Laura Jana (author of From Birth to Reality: Heading Home with Your Newborn) when she had a baby during her pediatric residency at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital in Cleveland. She was a total go-getter, and as a medical student at Case started a lecture series. When she invited Dr. Benjamin Spock, the famous pediatrician, they became friends. After he passed away, she stayed friendly with his wife Mary Morgan, and they came up with the idea of a website to continue his work. Several years and a few children later, Laura wanted someone to write about pregnancy and thought of me. She had no idea if I could write, but she knew I was a good explainer. Fast forward to 2000, right as the internet bubble was about to burst. I flew out to SF to interview with their internet startup, drspock.com; I began writing for drspock in 2000. We put up a pretty comprehensive set of articles on pregnancy, parenting, and child health. It was challenging to figure out what topics to cover, and how to organize the site; we thought it was useful, and we sure felt validated when we were nominated for a Webby award, the highest honor in the online world. I wrote several hundred pregnancy articles, not counting a slew of “ask our experts” answers. We even got a chance to make a set of magazine-style programs for public TV, and I wrote my first book, Dr. Spock’s Pregnancy Guide. It was a great crew to work with, and I was sad when our bubble burst. My editor Mona now works in the communications department of a large law firm (for bucks you can’t make in editing), our fearless leader David started TeeBeeDee.com, a terrific social networking site for baby boomers, and our producers Elizabeth and Rachel work for cafemom.com and Disney’s familyfun.com respectively. I kept my day (and sometimes night) job in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at MacDonald Women’s Hospital in Cleveland.When I no longer had a job with drspock, I went to a course put on by SEAK called Non-Fiction Writing for Physicians, and learned more about the publishing process. Six months later I had a book proposal, an agent, and a publisher. Right around then, I was offered a gig blogging two or three articles a week for Yahoo! health. They named my blog Wisdom From Mother Birth (really). If I had the Yahoo! opportunity before I started working on The Working Woman’s Pregnancy Book, I probably wouldn’t have written another book. I just wanted the chance to keep writing. But I was committed, so after two years of writing pretty much every free minute, the publisher had my manuscript. Then we did about a year of editing and organizing, and last week I got my first copy of The Working Woman’s Pregnancy Book, hot off the press. Having my new book in hand is pretty cool!