I've always been a writer...

Halloween, 1976. I've also always been a crazy cat lady.

...is what most writers will tell you, and we're usually not lying. As soon as I could string words together in my atrocious handwriting, I was making up stories. (I used to get a lot of "C" and "D" on my report card in Handwriting. Yes, we were graded on it!) My handwriting is still horrible, but I like to think my stories have gotten better over the years.

In elementary school, I started off writing poetry (a.k.a. the gateway drug) and managed to win a prize in my local library's writing contest with a nifty little piece entitled "The Unicorn". This fueled my craving for more writing and I continued to churn out poetry and occasional songs increasingly filled with teen angst as I grew. Then I moved on to short stories and skits and then, (gasp) it happened. I discovered fan fiction and from then on, no favorite celebrity or book character was safe.

Oh, the hours I and my best friend at the time would spend concocting these daydreams of "What if?" and "Why not?". It was absolute soap opera level drama, but it was practice. Like target shooting or singing scales. Missing the target or the note most of the time. It also made me realize that writing does not occur in a vacuum. You need to have experiences, think about those experiences, and learn something from them to craft a good story. As a teen I was obsessed with Anne Rice vampires, Roger Zelazny fantasy, X-Men, hard rock bands, and actors like Kiefer Sutherland and Val Kilmer. You can imagine what kind of poetry and stories that inspired!

(I won another poetry award with one called "Lestat". Yes, very cringe.)

As I stepped into the no-fun adult world of having a job, I continued writing, forming the ideas and characters for my first novel that wouldn't be written until ten years later. I also wrote a script for The X-Files involving the Philadelphia Experiment (this was way back in the 1900s, before Stranger Things: The First Shadow was written) Of course I never did anything with it and it is still in a filing cabinet. How appropriate.

I started and never finished dozens of stories and scripts before I finally pushed myself to write a novel, just to see if I could do it. The end result was Aeternitas, published in 2009. An Indiana Jones meets the X-Files kind of international thriller, stop the bad guys, save the world. It is now out of print and horrendously dated. I do have plans to re-release it after heavy editing is completed.

And I keep writing. Not consistently - I've never been good with routines - but I've managed to write two more novels, a cookbook, a short story collection, and an audio drama. One of those novels managed to get nominated for the Poe Baltimore "Saturday Visiter" Award and I got to spend an amazing weekend in Baltimore. I'm currently finishing the screenplay of that book and maybe I'll get lucky and find someone to make a movie...