About me

My high school AP English teacher knew something I didn’t.

I grew up drawing. I drew not only pictures and landscapes and portraits, but houses. I have notebooks full of house plans and elevations I would draw constantly in my spare time. I wanted to be an architect and design houses since I was nine years old. It was never a question, and I never strayed from that desire. In fact, I went to college and got a Master’s degree in architecture, a minor in interior design, and I almost got a minor in art but that shit’s time-consuming. My college plans were already laid out when Senior Awards night came.

I was invited as a recipient of an award. I assumed the award would be from the yearbook teacher, since I had been Editor-in-Chief of the yearbook both Junior and Senior year. Indeed, I did get an award from her, along with my Co-editor, an amazingly brilliant girl named Hongmey Zehn (I couldn’t make that name up if I tried), but imagine my surprise when Mrs. Norton called my name for Top English student.

She gave me a book of poems and said she was so excited to see what I did in the future. I still took no mind and went forward with my plans in design.

Fast forward to a year after college graduation, I was consuming romance novels as fast as I could find them when an idea for a novel popped into my head. It didn’t take long to realize that idea was far too advanced for my current skills when the plot for a fun and sexy college-aged romance begged me to write it. So I did. It took five years and three kids to do it, but that novel is my debut, To Be Your Girl.

Looking back, I should have seen the signs I secretly wanted to be a writer. That creative writing class I took freshman year of college was one of my favorites; I wish I had taken more. And there was the whole being an editor thing. That should have been a clue.

But even earlier there had been signs. I began and abandoned my first novel at age thirteen. It was a Historical Romance (light on the history and, frankly, a little too heavy on the romance for a thirteen-year-old).

In the end, I realized I just love to create. To make something out of nothing using only imagination and practiced skill, whether that is with a paintbrush, or designing someone’s dream home, or making someone experience first love through the written word.