As a young adult, I thought I was going to tell my stories as a documentary filmmaker, but somehow in between my undergraduate film degree and my acceptance to an MFA program at a California film school, my life took a turn. A big one. I met a boy.
With him, I ended up living a very different life that included cooking professionally in Alaska during the summer and wintering in a tiny town in the North Cascade Mountains. It was not what I, the consummate city girl, had ever pictured for myself, but it was an adventure. I mean, can you picture me on a moose hunt? It was all very Hemmingway-esque.
All along that detour, I wrote comics and fiction, and in 1999 I sold my first short story to Cricket Magazine. It was about a girl fly-fishing for the first time. After that sale, I figured I’d go for it and write a novel, which I completed in 2000. It was about a woman living in a fishing town, go figure. During that time, I joined a wonderful creative writing group in my town—and ended up meeting with them every Monday night for the next six years. More unpublished books followed, but it wasn’t until several years later, when I had taken a gig substitute teaching elementary school, that I found my writing’s niche—Young Adult.
See, I really enjoyed teaching and working with the students. Soon though, I realized that many of the older girls had a hard time finding good books. They had already read all the great ones and needed more. So I set out to write the books I wished they could read—or that I could have read at their age.
One of the students, Emily H., got me really motivated. She read a few chapters of my first YA manuscript and encouraged me to keep going. She actually stopped me at the crosswalk she was guarding and said, "Hey! Did you finish chapter 5 yet? I have to know what happened to Amber’s dad." It was awesome to have a teen reader like Emily. I’ll always be grateful for her help. Read more.