Nancy Isaak

"Anarchy" was first written as a feature film script. Because I liked the story so much, I then decided to write a book and expand on the relationship between the two main characters.

The actual story was inspired by my living on the edge of a cliff in a desolate part of Malibu. Some days I would stand on the bluffs and not a see a single soul. I kept imagining what it would be like if the world had somehow ended and now I had to figure out how to survive living there all by myself. Then--just to make things interesting--I decided to add in some vicious, feral beasts who were migrating north, right through my front yard.

Of course, I never wrote the book about me. Instead, I put two young women in the main roles--sisters who had been on the run from the beasts since they were 4 and 9-years old.

That's a great question.

According to my mother, I started writing when I was still in kindergarten. I would make up all these crazy stories and print them out, then decorate them with some really bad drawings. Most of them--for whatever reason--had to do with animals and little girls having adventures in the forests (usually getting lost and having to find their way out.)

As I got older my mother would bring home scraps of paper from her work and I would use them to write longer--and hopefully better--stories. This was in my teenage years, when I fell in love with Science Fiction and Fantasy, so most of my tales took on a dystopian/post-apocalyptic bent.

Also--I wrote some truly awful poetry.