I come by my penchant for writing through genetics. My mother is a published author, and I grew up watching her work and hearing her talk about her stories. I've always had stories and characters running through my head, and finally decided it was time to let them speak.

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My first published work was Inspiration Lost and Found in an anthology titled Be Mused. This is a really funny collection of novellas about our muses and how they live in a world just left of ours, and we -- the writers -- are their jobs. Their assignments. I was sixteen when that was published. Unfortunately, it is no longer available.

 

I wrote my second novel, Land of Misfit Teens, during my senior year in high school and finished just before I began college. I'll never forget finishing that book because I was somewhere over the United States in a plane flying home from Maine to California. My Papa Shoes (there is a story behind the name) had died and we had been in Maine to take care of things. I had started the book, but while there I had to write or go crazy. The story just flowed. That book was published when I was eighteen.

 

​I was twenty when I finished Dreams, and it mirrored my life in that both I and Jamie were in college at the time. While writing that book, I lost my uncle who was more like a big brother to me. So, if you find my books have a lot of raw emotion, this is why. I can't filter out what's in my heart, but I can at least give a happy ending to my characters. 

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While in college, I wrote The Hand You're Dealt in hopes of helping people understand what it's like to live with an invisible Illness. In the case of this novel, that illness is Complex Regional Pain Syndrome or Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (CRPS/RSD), a disease I was diagnosed with at sixteen. It is the most painful documented disease in medicine. 

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I've always been a rebel in that I believe in being who I am, the way I am, and I've never let others tell me who or what I should be. If that means I crack a joke from time to time, that's cool. If it means someone doesn't like me because I'm not like them... that's cool, too. It also means I've learned a few lessons... your friends are your friends, no matter what, if they really are your friends. God loves me, no matter what. And at the end of the day, I'm proud of who I am, no matter what.