 She later sold the bookstore, which served the students of Stephen F. Austin State University and people in the East Texas area, providing a wide variety of books and literature as well as Joe's computer services that would otherwise have been unavailable to the region at that time..

She moved back to Texas to become an active fantasy and science-fiction writer, and lived on a place bordering the Attoyac River as it entered the Sam Rayburn Lake, which is in the Big Thicket country (today just outside the official Big Thicket National Preserve).The imaginative work she produced at that time has been compared to that of Andre Norton and Clifford Simak.Like Simak she often places rural people of straightforward decency into strange situations.