I have always been a reader, that kid that would stay up reading long past my bedtime huddled under the covers with a book. But, I didn’t start writing until a grade 7 Language Arts assignment. We were given a one page chapter and asked to write nine more to finish the story. As soon as I put pen to paper, I was hooked. My love of books led me to a degree in highfalutin English Lit, but my heart will always belong to the YA genre.  My home is lined with bookshelves, some dedicated to literary novels and classics, other completely over flowing with young adult books ranging from The Babysitters Club all the way up to The Hunger Games. 

Canadian to the core, I love having for four distinct seasons. Even if I do spend half the year cursing the icy winds crystallizing my lungs, I would never give it up for year round heat. Fluffy, floaty flakes. Crusts of frozen snow breaking under foot. The slow shift of leaves from green to red to yellow. Skipping through puddles in spring. The slapping of flip flops against feet. These moments will show up across the stories I write, but I have a habit of setting things from September to November. Autumn is my favourite season, and Halloween is my all time, without question, favourite holiday. I sometimes have to convince myself that drama can happen as easily in June as it can in October.

I also spell like a Canadian; so, embrace the wayward ‘u’ and ‘re’ and the use of the oxford comma, and we will get along famously.

The bare bones of every story in the world has already been told, so things like plot, grammar and character development matter. I try to keep this concept in mind when I’m writing. How do I take this idea and make it my own? I write for myself, I have too many people in my head not to get them down on paper, but I hope that I write things that people will want to read. That someone out there can take my stories and get lost in them the same way I get lost in the characters when I’m writing them.