Karin Ireland has been a writer for more years than she’d like to admit and credits her perseverance to two things: a terrific critique group early on and a strong urge to tell other people what to do.

In school, she found it difficult to remember the boring lessons she had to read so when it was her turn to write she made sure her books were interesting. Her first books, for middle-grade readers, were Hollywood Stuntpeople, Helicopters at Work and a very interesting biography on Albert Einstein.

She was quick to catch on to the concept of multi-tasking and wrote three humor books while commuting to work. She says it wasn’t really that hard once she remembered to look where she was driving and not at the notepad in her lap.

A few years later she went to some workshops that changed her life and she wanted to help others change theirs, too, so she wove the philosophies she learned into her next books: The Job Survival Instruction Book; How to Have All the Answers When the Questions Keep Changing; Take Charge of Your Life! (to be released early 2012); The Best Christmas Ever—How to Recapture the True Spirit of the Holidays; 365 Ways to Help Your Child Succeed; Boost Your Child’s Self-esteem; and a picture book for children, Wonderful Nature, Wonderful You. Her self-help memoir, Learning to Trust Myself: Lessons from Cancer and Other Life Dilemmas, tells about having breast cancer and choosing her own wellness plan instead of following the advice of several doctors.

Her latest picture book, Don’t Take Your Snake For a Stroll, has no message, really, it’s just for fun. Which she has come to realize is just as important as everything else.