A Lifetime of Stories, Imagination, and Heart
Carole Walker Carter has been collecting stories for most of her life—sometimes without even realizing it.
Born in a small Nebraska town, Carole spent much of her childhood moving with her family across the United States. Every new community brought different people, personalities, landscapes, and experiences. She learned early to observe the world around her, and those memories eventually became part of the imagination from which her characters and stories would grow.
The Heart of Her Life
At the center of Carole’s world is her family.
Her daughter, Jen, has always been the heart and breath of her life. A talented artist with a generous spirit, Jen volunteers her time and creativity teaching art to elementary school children. She brings remarkable patience to raising her own children and an unwavering loyalty to her family and friends. Carole takes enormous pride not simply in what Jen has accomplished, but in the woman she has become.
Jen and her wife, Lisa, have also built extraordinary professional lives together. Lisa serves as Chief Executive Officer and Jen as Marketing Director of 360 Payment Solutions, the credit-card processing company they launched with their friends and fellow entrepreneurs, Steve and Jesse. Lisa later created Promotive, a recruiting company that connects skilled automotive technicians with repair shops searching for talented people.
And then there are Carole’s grandchildren, Alex and Nixon, who bring an entirely different kind of energy to her world.
Alex is a tenacious, funny, energetic whirlwind of creativity with a love of music, imagination, and her close childhood friend Piper. Alex has tremendous balance she can show off her talent in skateboarding and gymnastics. Nixon, only ten, seems determined to master nearly everything he tries. He competes at a high level in soccer, baseball, lacrosse, skateboarding and ice hockey—and when he finally comes inside, he can play a mean set of drums.
Their personalities, accomplishments, humor, and seemingly endless energy are a constant source of joy and pride for both Carole and Don.
Family has never simply been one part of Carole’s life.
It is the heart around which everything else revolves.
A Story That Began Young
Another of the defining stories of Carole’s life began long before she became a published author.
Carole and Donald E. Carter were high school sweethearts, but life did not carry them forward together at first. Don joined the U.S. Navy without telling Carole, and their lives moved in different directions.
For four decades, each built a separate life.
Then, forty years later, they found one another again.
What had begun as a teenage romance became something deeper the second time around—a partnership built not only on memory, but on experience, perspective, and the realization that some connections are never entirely lost.
Carole and Don have now shared nearly two decades together, creating a life filled with writing, publishing, travel, outdoor adventures, family, and projects that often begin with one of them asking, “What if we tried this?”
Their reunion became one of the defining stories of both their lives and remains at the heart of Walker Carter Publishing. When Don first read Carole’s early manuscript of Aztara, A Galactic Love Story, he was struck by how much the relationship at the heart of the story reminded him of the two of them as young adults.
Perhaps some stories simply wait until the right time to be told.
A Career Devoted to Children
Carole’s professional life centered on children.
As an Occupational Therapy Assistant and Educational Assistant, she worked with young people from preschool through high school, including children with special needs and children considered at risk.
Those years gave her a unique appreciation for individuality, resilience, imagination, and the remarkable ways children understand the world.
They also influenced her writing.
Carole learned that courage does not always look heroic. Sometimes it is simply a child trying again. Sometimes it is learning to trust someone. Sometimes it is discovering that being different can also mean possessing unexpected strengths.
Those ideas appear repeatedly in the characters she creates.
Horses, Dogs, and a Life with Animals
Animals have always been an important part of Carole’s life.
For as long as those who know her can remember, there has usually been a horse, a dog—or both—nearby.
Carole loved riding, training, and caring for her horses. She found in them an extraordinary combination of strength and sensitivity and understood that the relationship between horse and rider was built on patience, communication, and trust.
Her dogs were equally important.
Carole never simply owned dogs. She worked with them, trained them, cared for them, and developed relationships with each according to its own personality.
Her Schipperke, Rally, earned Carole her first Companion Dog title. Her Dalmatian, Bingo, earned her second. Later, her Belgian Sheepdog, Porter, earned her third.
Three very different dogs. Three Companion Dog titles. And behind each was the patience and dedication Carole brought to working with animals throughout her life.
That same quality can be found in her relationships with children and even in her writing—the willingness to observe carefully, recognize individuality, and understand that trust is something earned rather than demanded.
Horses and dogs were never simply hobbies for Carole. They became part of the rhythm of her life and another rich source of experiences, personalities, and relationships that found their way into her imagination.
An Imagination Without One Genre
Carole has never confined herself to a single kind of story.
Her books move comfortably between children’s fantasy, mystery, science fiction, family history, adventure, and suspense.
In The Child Rowanda Series, she created magical worlds in which a young girl discovers courage, friendship, responsibility, and extraordinary abilities.
In the Evers & McFarlan Detective Series, Carole moved into crime and suspense, following Tish Evers and Scotty McFarlan as they grow from young investigators into a formidable husband-and-wife detective team.
Her imagination travels even farther in the Aztarian Series, where relationships, discovery, technology, love, and distant civilizations provide an entirely different canvas for her storytelling.
And in Childhood Stories My Dad Told Me, Carole turned toward her own family history, preserving the stories her father, Dean, told about growing up on a Nebraska farm during the Great Depression.
Different worlds. Different characters. Different genres.
But always stories about people—and the relationships that shape them.
Life Beyond the Writing Desk
Carole’s adventures have never existed only on the page.
She is an accomplished angler with a familiar habit—at least according to Don—of catching the first fish and often the biggest fish.
Some of their most treasured days together were spent in an old wooden Acorn Skiff they rescued and rebuilt after reconnecting. The little boat became much more than a restoration project.
Together, they brought it back to life. Don crafted wooden oars for it, and the two of them spent hundreds of hours rowing and fishing the alpine lakes around Bend and Sisters, Oregon.
Those quiet days on high mountain water became part of the second life they were building together—clear lakes, trout, handmade oars, long conversations, and the steady rhythm of a wooden skiff moving across the water.
The Acorn came to represent much of what Carole and Don valued about their life together: finding something worth saving, restoring it with care, and then using it to create entirely new memories.
And, of course, Carole usually caught the first fish.
That became part of the fun. Carole knew that behind many of those successful outings was Don’s habit of quietly researching almost everything before they reached the water—the weather, time of day, fish species, water conditions, rigging, bait, lure, or fly.
Don enjoyed solving the puzzle of the water.
Carole had a remarkable habit of turning all that preparation into the first fish in the boat.
Together, fishing became part science, part instinct, and part friendly competition.
Through the Difficult Years
Carole’s strength became especially important during one of the most difficult chapters of their life together.
From 2014 through 2024, while Don underwent treatment for metastatic prostate and bone cancer, Carole became his constant caregiver, advocate, and companion. She remained beside him through treatment, uncertainty, setbacks, difficult days, and recovery.
It was a decade that demanded patience, endurance, humor, hope, and an extraordinary partnership.
For Carole and Don, those years reinforced something they had already learned after finding one another again:
Time is precious, and the people with whom we choose to share it matter more than almost anything else.
Walker Carter Publishing
Carole and Don eventually created Walker Carter Publishing, LLC as a home for the stories, books, and ideas that had accumulated throughout their lives.
Today, Carole continues to write while helping shape the growing Walker Carter Publishing catalog.
Her stories range from the magical adventures of Rowanda to the investigations of Evers and McFarlan and the distant worlds of Aztara. New stories continue to emerge, including the return of Tish and Scotty in Judgment Day Committee and continuing adventures in the Aztarian Series with Aztara, Shadows of Surtees.
After a lifetime of observing people, imagining possibilities, loving deeply, and collecting experiences, Carole still finds new characters asking to have their stories told.
Perhaps that is the simplest way to understand her as a writer.
She sees stories everywhere.
In her daughter and grandchildren.
In children discovering what they are capable of.
In families and friendships.
In horses and dogs.
In mysteries waiting to be solved.
In distant worlds waiting to be imagined.
In a father remembering his childhood.
In two high school sweethearts finding one another again after forty years.
And sometimes, in a little wooden skiff gliding across a mountain lake, with two fly rods aboard and both anglers waiting to see who catches the first fish.
With Carole, the smart money is still on Carole.