If you're looking for a little insight into Janet, check out "River of Stones" in Amazon Shorts. For some raw facts, here's a quick biography.

Born September 24, 1939 to Thea Abraham-Berliner and Manfred Berliner in Cape Town, South Africa. Her parents and grandparents had fled Germany in 1936 to escape the growing Nazi terror. Janet's father left soon after Janet's birth to fight the Germans in North Africa, and returned only to tell her mother that he had found another woman.

Raised mostly by her grandparents while her mother worked a succession of jobs--including South Africa's first traveling sales woman--Janet never learned to tell the difference between black and white. That failure caused her great trouble as she grew older and began working for a small newspaper. First writing reviews, and later becoming "Dear Jan" to South Africa's Jewish youth, Janet, now Gluckman, found an outlet for her life-long desire to write. This outlet also led her to plenty of trouble, however, given her views.

Soon after her twenty-first birthday, Janet and her husband tried to get permanent visas for America. They were told that there was a twenty year waiting list. Because they had asked, they were also refused tourist visas. They took a student ship to England and, once there, managed to get Canadian tourist visas. They found a cheapie flight to North America and began the battle for permanent status. After six tense months of living in hotel rooms and eating "ketchup soup" to stretch their meager savings, Janet and her husband acquired green cards. They became citizens of the United States of America in 1966.

Janet took work in a travel agency, a job she'd had experience with in South Africa, and also as a stringer for local papers to support the family while her husband finished his Ph.D. in chemical engineering. She had two beautiful daughters during this time, and also went to night school at Rockland Community College and Empire State College.

She became the test-student for Dr. Samuel Draper's classroom-without-walls honors program, completing Masters-level coursework while earning her Bachelors degree. Her friendship with Dr. Draper has lasted and grown over the years since then, including his dedicating his course-books to Janet.

In 1972, Janet and her family moved to Cupertino, California, where her husband had a new job with an energy company. It was through that work that Janet received her first translation job, Catalytic Hydrogenation of Coal Tar and Oil Under Pressure, a long and dry engineering text. With the awareness that she could work in publishing from her home and still maintain the family, Janet started Professional Media Services in 1975.

After many years working as an editor, agent, translator, and lecturer, Janet began selling her own fiction. In 1980, she sold two novels, Rite of the Dragon, which she wrote on her own, and The Execution Exchange, which she co-wrote with Woody Greer. About the same time, she worked with Ray Brown to develop a film project, then titled Tintype, and sold it to the Ladd Company. They hired Brian Clemens of The Avengers fame to write the screenplay which became Timestalkers. You won't find her name in the credits, however, for reasons you'll have to wait for her autobiography to read.

At the time, she also developed myasthenia gravis, an auto-immune disorder which impedes muscle use. It grew so severe that at one point the only way Janet could get nourishment was by feeding herself oatmeal through an eyedropper, and she could only type by guiding the fingers of one hand with the other, one key-stroke at a time. During all this time, no one knew why Janet's condition was deteriorating. Most thought it was a psychological problem. Then, in a flash of inspiration, Janet remembered a soap opera she had watched with her mother-in-law many years earlier where a person developed similar symptoms. Almost unable to speak, Janet scrawled "I have myasthenia. Help me!" on a sign and went to the first doctor's office she could find that said neurology.