When I was very young, I didn't want to be
a writer. I wanted to be a grandma. After all, grandmas don't
have to work, they enjoy the company of children whenever they
desire, and whenever they don't, they send them home to their
parents. I would wear a large-old fashioned hat, have salt-and-pepper
Gibson girl hair, and grow roses.
When I discovered that grandma-ing
was not a career, I settled on writing as second best.
I began
dictating my first stories to my mother before I could write.
I filled notebooks in elementary school, and
in middle school and high school, I wrote over 800 manuscript
pages in my spare time as well as four plays that saw production.
Yet
I never seriously considered writing as a career after elementary
school. Writers starve, I was always told; a writer
makes a decent wage about as often as pigs fly. And I wanted
to make money, so I moved from Texas to Indiana to enroll
in Purdue's engineering program.
I hated it.
Finally, I decided there was a
good deal of difference between being good at a thing and
liking it and that liking it was
more important, so I left engineering. After changing my
major a second time, I still managed to graduate in four
years with majors in English and Spanish and a minor in
religious studies--and almost another major in creative writing
if
illness hadn't prevented me from completing it. Meanwhile,
I wrote three manuscripts and began submitting them and
collecting rejection letters.
After graduation, I married a
wonderful man I met my sophomore year, and so far we have
one son. We're now living on a half
acre in the mountains of New Mexico, where I write full
time and update my website as frequently as possible.
I got
my first contract in the late spring of 2004, two years after
I graduated from college, and I'm hoping to sell
many more books!
In addition to writing, I am a competitive
ballroom dancer as well as a sometime gardener.
