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GREENSBORO — I do love Dorothy O'Neill's bumper sticker.

WRITE NAKED.

She has it on her office door upstairs, a few steps from her computer and bookshelves of research she uses to churn out books, full of mystery and romantic intrigue.

She'll talk about her latest this Sunday afternoon at Barnes & Noble. It's a G-rated romance, called "Heart On Hold," set around a tree-shadowed lake where a red-haired girl from Virginia juggles the affections of two love-drunk men.

It's a breathless page-turner. I read it. But that's not what got me upstairs, by her door, staring at WRITE NAKED or her neat stacks of uncounted manuscripts.

It was Dorothy's age. She's 92. And since she was 79, she has written 11 books.

And she's still going strong.

She lives with her 85-year-old sister, Audrey, in a two-story townhouse off Battleground Avenue. And almost every day, when Dorothy's not cleaning or hosting a meeting of her garden club, she's behind her office door.

Like clockwork.

She starts writing in the morning and continues through the afternoon.

She once composed everything on a portable typewriter. Today, she writes on a computer, penning stories that spring into her mind.

When I asked her about her mysteries, she told me she plucks her ideas from newspapers, TV shows and a multi volume series that details everything from poison to police procedure.

But when I asked about her romance novels, I got a simple cock of the head.

"I'm 92 years old, and I've had plenty of romance in my life," she told me. "I had romance when I came to Greensboro. The trouble is they all died. It's not true when they say we're the weaker sex."

The writer's life is nothing new for Dorothy.

She wrote her first poem in second grade, filled speckled notebooks with her prose in high school and transcribed her family life in print for a local newspaper in Staten Island, N.Y.

She was a dentist's wife, a mother of four sons. Back then, she wrote a newspaper column for a weekly newspaper. She called it "All Around The House" and tapped into the craziness of raising four sons.

She also wrote light verse for national magazines such as Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping . The first time she got paid for a poem, she called her dentist husband at work. She was ecstatic. He … wasn't.

"Oh guess what," she told him. "They published my poem and they gave me a check for $3."

After a long pause, he said, "I guess I can retire now."

Dorothy keeps a yellowed 1965 newspaper article about those poem-to-publisher experiences behind a frame above her computer. In the accompanying photo she resembles June Cleaver, wearing a dress, with two of her clean-cut boys looking over her shoulder. The story's headline: "Dorothy P. Barlow Earns Her Byline At Home."

Yet she didn't start writing books until the death of her second husband. She moved to Greensboro 18 years ago to be closer to her family in North Carolina. Her brother, Arthur Pentz, lives here.

With so much free time, she turned again to the writer's life. She looked for a publisher and, through her research at a local book store, found one in Avalon Books.

As she likes to say, Avalon was the "first shot out of the gun."

When Dorothy turned 90, one of her sons celebrated by holding a party at Lake Norman and giving everyone what at first looked like a cool concert T-shirt. It wasn't. It was a red T-shirt, with the titles of his mother's books printed on the back.

Today, two years later, behind that great bumper sticker, WRITE NAKED, Dorothy still writes. Almost every day. Her workmanlike regimen, she says, keeps her sharp.

"If it wasn't for writing, there wouldn't be much in life," she told me. "Oh, I have my family. But writing is so fulfilling. The first thing I do when I finish (a book), I clean up my office and think, 'Time to do another one.'"

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com