I've been writing since I could put words down on paper. My first writing memory comes from when I was in first or second grade and had to tag along to my older sister's Camp Fire group meeting that our mother was the leader of. I was nestled out of the way in the corner of the room with a bag full of books, paper, pencils, and small activity fodder to keep me out of the way. I spent my time drawing a picture of a race car and writing what I'm sure was a gripping, action-packed story about that car. When I was in high school, I started creating my own worlds and writing stories set in those worlds. It wasn't until I was older that I developed the necessary self-discipline to actually sit down and write a completed piece from beginning to end (without my creativity being hijacked by brand new ideas, each one adding to the long trail of unfinished pieces left in the dust). National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, or just NaNo) helped me learn just how much I could accomplish in a short time if I set my mind to it, and I credit that challenge with helping me mature as a writer and teach me the discipline necessary to finish the pieces that I now have complete.

Seeing connections grow organically from fragments of ideas or images floating around in my mind. My books rarely come in the form of 'Gee, I'd like to write a story about this specific protagonist facing this specific situation.' Usually they start as one specific scene that sticks in my head, typically from somewhere in the middle of the story, and then I build the rest of the story around that scene. For example, in Treasure Hunted, the first thing I wrote was the pool scene, which was based on a rather bizarre but incredibly vivid dream I had one night. From there, I had to figure out who these people were, why they were there, what they were doing, and so on. Those decisions and fragments grew into a story. That growth, watching all of those pieces fall into place, is one of my greatest loves in the writing process.

I first started exploring publishing options before eBooks had entered the scene. In that time, writers had limited alternatives to the 'traditional' publishing process. It pretty much boiled down to the highly expensive route of publishing your own physical books and then carting them around to every bookstore within reach in hopes that someone would sell them or shelling out at least a thousand dollars to a vanity publisher. Not exactly appealing options. This left me with the idea stuck in my head that the only legitimate and valid way to publish a book without breaking the bank was to find a traditional publisher. After years of frustration with the querying process, I began to explore the new alternatives that had opened up - namely, eBook publishing. And what I learned made sense. Traditional publishers have to put a lot of money into projects up front with little guarantee of returns on that investment, so they have little motivation to take risks on unknown authors. But now that eBooks can be published with no up-front cost to the author... Suddenly, self-publishing became more and more of a valid, reasonable option in my mind. It took some time to get past the mental block that had been established in those earlier years, but now I'm excited about this new venture.

I have several other completed pieces that I'm working on preparing for publishing. My family is in the process of immediate growth which has shuffled my writing work to a second priority for the moment, but I hope to get back to work getting the other pieces put together and posted on this and other eBook sites. These run the range from urban sci-fi to straight fantasy to speculative Christian to post-apocalyptic. As long as you like speculative fiction - any style where the normal rules of reality need not apply - then you're likely to find something fitting your tastes!