I love it too much to stop. I love stepping into a character's world and becoming fully immersed in that universe. It's better than any job I've ever had.

For me, it's always been about the characters. One drops into my head and has a story to tell. Sometimes I have to do a little digging, because as we all know, there are many sides to a story.

I was a little fat girl in a small town in rural New York. I was teased and bullied a lot for not being like the other kids. Books made faithful companions. And living on the periphery of the normal social flow allowed me to observe human nature and gave me a bit more compassion for my flawed characters.

I've been keeping a journal since my teens and wrote for the school literary magazine. But I didn't start writing seriously until my mid-twenties. On a break between freelance gigs, I had an idea for a story. It was terrible, but I kept writing more stories, sending them out, getting rejected, writing more. Eventually one got published, and eventually one felt bigger than would fit in the confines of a short story, so I began writing novels and never looked back.

Sliding Past Vertical is a dark love story about a young woman whose hasty decisions often backfire, with sometimes amusing but sometimes serious consequences. It circles around the friendship between Sarah, the walking disaster area, and Emerson, whom she'd dated in college. The story came out of a writing exercise: go back to a point in your life where you needed to make a major decision, take the other path, and imagine what might happen. Sarah happened. And to his irritation and secret delight, she keeps happening to Emerson.

I like a challenge, and I like to be independent. The path seemed a good match for me. My first book, The Joke's on Me, was published by 4RV, a small press. They're lovely and put out nice books, but like most small presses, there's little in the marketing budget. I had to learn a lot about doing it myself. When my next book was ready for publication, I thought I'd try to self-publish. I liked the freedom. But I'm still learning about the responsibility, and about how to build a business.

I really appreciate my fans. Hearing from readers completes the circle, in a way. And if not for comments from fans about wanting to hear more from certain characters, I might not have written my last couple of projects.

I'm just about to publish a prequel to my contemporary novel Don't Tell Anyone—a romantic novella titled The Picture of Cool. Next is the sequel to Don't Tell Anyone. Yes, I know I'm doing it backwards and sideways. It's been a great exercise in plotting and working with a timeline, because I'd never intended on making DTA anything but a stand-alone novel. But I'm happy to be working with these characters again. Charlie and Liza are great together and I love seeing what happens next for them.

I read a lot of my friends' books. Or I get a word-of-mouth recommendation.

Yes, it was horrid! A high-school writing assignment. A cat-loving man moves in with his plant-loving girlfriend, and the cats and plants start destroying each other. At the time, I thought it was fabulous.