There was a certain destiny to my career as a writer. My mother was an actress and the theater ran deep in her veins. Some of my earliest memories of the two of us are: me with script in hand feeding her cue lines. I grew up reading and watching the plays of Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, Tennessee Williams and more. I viewed these plays, not just once, but every night she was on stage.
Writing as a career is hard and challenging. But it’s the one thing I do better than anything else.
My work has appeared in just about every medium you can imagine, from TV scripts to series concepts, comic books, children’s books, business plans and magazine articles. I have written theater and restaurant reviews in exchange for great seats and free food. I have even been a ghost-writer for a celebrity, which is more work and less haunting than it sounds. Now, I’m writing what I truly love which are YA thrillers and mysteries with a forensic twist.
If I hadn’t actually been born to be a writer I’m pretty sure I would use forensics to solve real crimes… or, maybe I’d save whales.
Both of these things are passions of mine and I know I would love doing them. Probably not as much as I love writing, but still. There is a tiny problem in that the sight of actual blood makes me queasy (bonus queasy points when it’s my own.) And, of course there is sea sickness. Dear Ocean, I love you but seriously those waves… pheew. Signed: me.
In the end I always come back to writing because even though there’s rarely blood or sloshing waves, there’s plenty of excitement on the page and I still get the tingling roller coaster rush when I nail an especially elusive point in a story.
Writing for children’s television was not only a great career and a bunch of fun but it was also a fantastic step in my process. Some of the most difficult techniques for an author to master are easy all-day for the TV writer. Things like: the elevator pitch, crafting an outline or synopsis and maintaining pace and tension over 300 pages and a crap-load of characters.
My path to publishing was harder than I thought it would be.
My transition from film to fiction was harder than I thought it would be and it took longer than my break into TV. It also included side trip into grad school at Vermont College of Fine Arts (aka Hogwarts for people who wish they had invented Hogwarts).
If you’d like to know what other things I’ve written, you can check out my online resume.
