Tammy Seley Elliott
Tammy was a kid who moved around a lot; they weren’t a military family or anything like that. It was more like her dad was not particularly normal and was something of a crook. So, when he chose or had to move, it was a package deal – wife, four kids, and dog –all hit the road, with or without all our things. It was all they knew, and while it was a little tough at times, it made Tammy and her siblings very close and made them all very adaptable human beings.
Somewhere along the line in her teenage years, she started to write, and it was the first inkling she had of “who I was.” She didn’t have any real direction; she only knew that it was the most natural thing she’d ever done and that one day she wanted to be an author and publish books. But she had a detour, and it was a big one. She joined the Air Force in 1982, wanting, to find a life that would keep her out of jail, to go to college and was pretty sure her minimum wage civilian job wouldn’t get her there, and to see the world.
Two things that weren’t in her plan was a desire to serve her country and to make a career of the military. As it turned out, she met the first three goals along with the two latter unintended ones. Twenty-nine and half years later she emerged as a chief master sergeant, with a bunch more life experience, who still wanted to write books. She retired in Boise, Idaho in 2011, at the age of fifty-one. In addition to caring for her mother who had Parkinson’s disease, she went to work on her first book, The Unlikely Savior, finishing it in 2012. It took a little longer to write the second novel, as her mother’s health declined and her care was an obvious priority. They lost her in July, 2016, but with her support in her heart, Tammy pressed forward and published the second book, Billet-Doux from a Dead Prisoner, in December – almost five months after her death. This was bittersweet, but it is all part of a great journey. She is beyond grateful she could be part of it, and that she was a part of hers. So here she is, still in Boise, writing the final part of The Unlikely Savior Trilogy, Finding the Window, which she expects to publish in 2018. Several new ideas are brewing in the back of her head unrelated to the trilogy. The future stories, in fact, are of different genres altogether; after all, variety is the spice of life and life is short! She has two grown sons and lives with her husband, Mike, and their pack of dogs and four chickens.