Third grade, riding the bus home, without a book but with a yellow legal pad. I can still remember the satisfaction of finishing my first ninety-page novel and knowing that I’d found what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

I grew up in Seattle, WA, just minutes from the U-Dub (University of Washington to those of you non-Seattlites), as the oldest of three children. My Grandma C. started teaching me to read when I was two, bribing me with a Barbie® doll for each book I’d finished. She stopped when I reached forty dolls, figuring that I was hooked and her job was done. Though I had other interests — piano and violin, dance and acting — a good book could always distract me.

My parents divorced when I was thirteen and I moved across the water to Bellevue. It was a rough adjustment for me, and I retreated more and more into a world of writing and books. My Grandma L. kept me well-supplied, and her love of fantasy and science fiction — Lloyd Alexander, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Anne McCaffrey, Andre Norton and others — spilled into my life. By the time I graduated high school in ‘96 and moved to Boston to attend Gordon College, I knew I wanted to be a writer.

Unfortunately, I let practicalities stand in my way. I majored in Business Administration with a concentration in International Business and minors in French and Spanish. Along the way, I spent some time in Argentina, France, and Jamaica, studying and working respectively.

And then I graduated (in ‘99) and discovered the wonderful world of rent, school loans, and car payments. So I got a job in finance and used my free time to write. Lunch breaks, after work, and on the weekends, I poured my energy into making my lifelong dream a reality.

It took three years, but in Dec. of 2002 I got the phone call I’d been waiting for, and in 2005 Shapeshifter’s Quest was published by Dutton Children’s Publishing. I now live in St Paul, MN, and have since acquired a husband who keeps me well supplied with chocolate while I’m in the throes of the current novel, and a cat who walks across my computer keyboard when I’ve ignored him for too long.