Not including all the years hoping for essay tests in school, Laurie (then just) O’Connor’s writing career began in the mid-70s as a reporter at The Cardunal Free Press, one of many small local publications in a not-much-bigger newpaper group in the Fox River Valley based in Carpentersville, Illinois. She wrote feature stories, did interviews, and covered various local government meetings.
Later, as a stay-at-home mom, Laurie O’Connor Stephans provided freelance writing services for everything from local businesses to an international economic council. She also wrote feature stories for The Northern Light, a monthly regional Lutheran newspaper, for twenty years.
Laurie’s initial exploration of creative writing began with her participation in the local cable access competition Project Publish in 2013. Check out all the episodes here. She now lives in Plano, Illinois, a far western suburb of her birthplace, Chicago (aka the greatest city in the world). By day, she works at a law firm. By night (when not fighting crime), she exercises her writing muscles in favor of the real ones. Most of her fiction features humor and twist endings, while she observes real life on the pages of her blog, We B Late.
She and her husband, Mike, share their empty nest with two ridiculously entitled dogs that (most days) they wouldn’t trade for anything in the world. She credits their harmonious forty-plus years of marriage to the shared joy of grandparenthood, and not the catharsis that comes from killing off characters whose resemblance to actual husbands persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Laurie loves theater (especially musicals), the Chicago Blackhawks (and hockey in general), reading (of course), puzzles (crossword and jigsaw), games (especially trivia), and watching Jeopardy (“I’ll take overuse of parentheses for $1,000, Alex”).
Once a Prompt a Time is her first published book.
