Janet_Norton_Bettag

Author bio:

With more than 35 years of experience, Janet has provided administrative and marketing support to a manufacturer, an accounting firm, a public relations group, a retail office products distributor, and a municipal police chief. Throughout her career she has prepared business correspondence, written press releases, created collateral pieces, scripted telemarketing calls, drafted grant proposals, and written and edited client newsletters and formal annual reports.

Her news articles, feature stories, and educational pieces included a wide range of topics including effective salesmanship, business succession planning, parent-child communications, financial planning for divorce, and responsible pet ownership. Janet has also managed media relations and provided research assistance to reporters in the print and electronic media. She has also edited several manuscripts, including a current metropolitan St. Louis bestseller.

In 2010, William E. Mathis, St. Louis publisher of Woods & Irons Magazine, the official voice of the Gateway PGA Foundation, recruited Janet as a contributing writer of feature stories for that publication. Her debut article was a history of The BackStoppers, a charitable organization that supports the families of fallen police officers, firefighters and EMTs. Later pieces included coverage of the Guns ’N’ Hoses charity boxing show, a profile interview with the executive chef of an exclusive golf club, and a fantasy holiday shopping spree, among others.

Janet’s short story, Collette’s Conundrum, was awarded second place in the paranormal/mystery short story (under 2,500 words) category at the 2011 Missouri Writers’ Guild Conference.

Just for fun, she researched and scripted dramatic monologues for two of the characters in the 2011 Voices of Valhalla project – a hayride through time presented in partnership with Valhalla Cemetery, the St. Louis Genealogical Society, the Hawthorne Players, and the St. Louis Writers Guild, of which she is a member. The play is staged as a hayride through Valhalla Cemetery and all the characters portrayed are actually interred there. Her other professional affiliations include membership in the Missouri Writers Guild and the Wee Writers of St. Charles.

Janet is the author of Normal Is So Overrated, a narrative non-fiction memoir that focuses on her survival of and recovery from a ruptured cerebral aneurysm in the mid-nineties. Her mission is to support and encourage other survivors and their caregivers by providing personal insight into the far-reaching effects of the experience and offering practical solutions to some of the many new challenges one faces after a traumatic brain incident. The book is in final edits and is scheduled for publication by Monograph Books in e-book format in January 2012.