Instead, Fabris has found herself more at home with a pen in hand. She has merged her desire to write with her background in stocks and bonds to publish Money...Cool! The book, which outlines the world of finance for an adolescent audience, was released by Los Gatos' Archipelago Press on Nov. 1.

Now retired from her career as a stockbroker, Fabris compiled the book's content out of five years of visits she made to area schools when she worked for Charles Schwab. Each visit was a supplement to the school's math curriculum, and Fabris would introduce imaginative scenarios to teach concepts like supply and demand. "Finance is not that hard. You just need to know the basics," she says. "Each time I visited the schools, I got letters from the kids begging me to come back."

She also found that one large financial question has already entered young minds. "The kids around here are so instilled with the idea of going to college," Fabris says. "My seven-year-old grandson is already talking about going to Stanford." She condensed the various concepts, including saving for college, into 12 chapters topped with an extensive glossary that she says can illuminate the confusing financial world for anyone. "Grown men and women have been telling me that it's easy to read," she says.

Fabris, who co-wrote two financial handbooks for women in the early 1980s, began writing Money...Cool! several years ago, but found difficulties working with large publishers. So, she turned to the small Archipelago Press, which is printing the book but providing few other services. "I have been working so hard to sell and promote the book," says Fabris, who has sent out more than 250 book kits to distributors. So far, Barnes & Noble bookstores and Amazon.com have picked up the book, and now she's working on getting Money...Cool! into local Borders bookstores.

The clerical work is not anything foreign to Fabris. Her career began as a secretary to major brokerage houses in 1960s Manhattan, where her first husband was an attorney. Through various jobs, she picked up the finer points of the stock market as well as experienced the controversies of the time, especially the feminist movement.

"I was on Wall Street the day that this huge group of women took off their bras," she says. One manager also fired Fabris to protect her from the firm's imminent indictment for fraud.

Two divorces later, Fabris found herself with a law degree and no job. She considered returning to a brokerage house, but didn't want to sell stocks over the phone. "I don't like dialing for dollars," she says. "I'm not a salesperson." A friend who worked for a weekly newspaper offered the chance to write a column, which Fabris took. She found that her column, which became nationally syndicated, and her public-speaking engagements on cruise ships and at conventions attracted plenty of clients. "I'm a ham," she says.

Since then, she has married her third husband, retired Superior Court Judge Al Fabris, and settled in Sunnyvale. She continues to write with a group of fellow authors, and soon hopes to diversify her literary portfolio. "This will be my last nonfiction," Fabris pledges.