"You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old reference. You have a sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of the experience of the person who reads it."
Ernest Hemingway To Bernard Berenson, 1954, Selected Letters, p.837
"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense." Tom Clancy
Bio
Viriginia C. Foley was born in Chicago and raised in the northwest suburbs, where she and her husband live today. She loves to write about Chicago and the surrounding area.
After attending St. Stephen School and Maine West High School, both in Des Plaines, she got her B.A. at Northeastern Illinois University where she majored in Elementary Education. She received her M.Ed. at National-Louis University.
Having lived in Charleston, South Carolina and Groton, Connecticut as a Navy wife, she returned with her husband to the northwest suburbs to raise their three daughters. During that time she worked as a teacher and subsititute teacher.
Writing has always been her passion, but she began honing the craft while working on her masters degree. Soon after finishing work on her masters, she began reworking her first novel, Righteous Indignation, which she had begun writing years before. When she published it in 2000, reader enthusiasm was so encouraging that she immediately got to work on I Think I Hear Sleigh Bells, which she published in early summer of 2003. Her third novel, Letting Go, was published in March 2010.
Now retired, Virginia is working on her fourth novel, which is yet to be named. Readers enjoy these character-driven stories.
Writing is the great passion of my life. I live and breathe my stories, and my characters become as real to me as anyone I know. Yet, they often surprise me with what they say and do each day as I sit down at my laptop to interact with them.Their audacity, cleverness, sensitivity, and gifts of adventure and love drive my stories and keep my readers turning pages. Thank you to all who have been so enthusiastic and supportive. And those of you who have not yet experienced the lives ofCain Farrell, Ethan McBride, or Jake Butler, I promise you it's worth the venture.
