:: a wiki project
I am a middle aged woman who's been a teacher for a couple of decades. I have been married for over twenty-five years. We have two kids, two dogs, and a house full of books--about ten thousand or so. That's because my husband is a professor, and I studied history in graduate school, and we both love reading!
I started writing novels about Sartorias-deles when I was eight, but the work was so hard I switched to making comic books of my stories. (I actually began making little books when I was six and seven, out of paper towels taped together.) I went back to novel writing when I was ten, and I never stopped. I tried sending out my novels when I was thirteen. I typed them on a manual, and wow, did that take a long time, especially since I was (and am) a terrible typist. I got letters saying "We almost bought this..." and "Try us again!" but nothing sold, so when I got to college, I figured I needed to learn something about writing that I just didn't yet grasp. It took fifteen more years to begin to learn about rewriting, but meantime I went to college, lived in Europe, came back to get my masters in History, worked in Hollywood, got married, started a family and became a teacher.
I discovered that studying history was a good thing for an author, because I learned how cultures are shaped, how people thought, acted, ate, and lived in the past. I learned what they really did, how, and most important, why. Reading history, plus getting one's own life experience, is the best way to help a writer create characters that are true to life, instead of copying them from other writers' visions in favorite books.
Wren to the Rescue was first written when I was seventeen. It was one of the ones I sent around all through high school, though in those days it was called Tess's Mess. It was the first one I sold after I began the long road (still on it!) to learn how to rewrite. Since then I've published over twenty-five books, many of them translated into other languages, like Russian. [1]