I've been writing since I was 16 years old. Alysia and I met shortly thereafter and started doing comics together and we picked up Melinda in college. The three of us have been together ever since.

The Apprentice series is basically a pulp-fiction style short story series I developed to use revolving artists with. It follows the adventures of Apprentice Wizard Dorian who lives her life as a male to study wizardry. The idea was loosely based on stories such as Twelfth Night, the ballad of Fa Mulan and others where women assume a male persona in order to accomplish goals they wouldn't otherwise be able to. In terms of the format, I wanted to so something that we could put out a little faster than our standard comics and the prose on The Apprentice had turned out nicely, so it worked.

My friends at KW and I decided that if we wanted to see our own work put out there, the way we wanted it to be, we would be best off on the indie circuit.

The ability to create new worlds and new ideas and draw other people in them. There's no greater joy than having other people enjoy my work.

Once, I was having a terrible start to a convention. The convention had experienced issues and couldn't check us into our table; our printer didn't show up with the books we needed; everybody had other things to do and left me, including my dinner date who had to go take care of a sick friend at last minute; the car was acting up; and just everything that could have gone wrong did. I was ready to go home and was talked into staying by Melinda. The next morning, we finally got to our table and the first visitor we had was a young lady on a cell phone specifically searching for us. Apparently her friend was a huge fan, couldn't make it and had sent her in search of our new book. The young lady then thrust her phone at me and asked me to talk to her friend who then told me how wonderful she thought my stories were. Despite the horrible start, that made my whole convention!

We have a long standing comic series called Fortune's Passage that we're attempting to reboot and another series of shorts called Midnight Highways.

Neil Gaimen is probably my most revered modern author. I had a fangirl moment once when I went to a book signing of his. I also like Patricia C. Wrede, CLAMP and of course the classics - Shakespeare, Conan Doyle, etc. I'm currently reading the Arsene Lupin stories by Maurice Leblanc.

The alarm clock. ;)

I work a full time job doing economic development projects in Hammond, Indiana. I also like taking road trips, doing crafty projects, spending time with my boyfriend Matt and a variety of other hobbies that keep me pretty busy.

Yes. it was dumb. I was a fifth grader. Enough said.

I start with a basic idea. Then I work of fleshing out the characters and world view and try to create a logical and cohesive world set up to build from. At the same time, I try and get the initial introduction story/chapter down. From there, I build additional stories/chapters by first outlining the basic points of what's supposed to happen and then fleshing them out. For comics, I write the prose first, then break it up into scenes and pages and readjust it into script format from there. Once each draft is done, I always step away to a different story or project and revisit it on the rewrite a week or two later. Also, before anything is published, I always have a third party read through an make comments.