How I Became a Writer I discovered writing in fourth grade, when my humanities teacher, Mrs. “I,” assigned us to write a story every week. My topics included elephants and hot air balloons that could talk, but I was hooked on writing. I told everyone that I was going to be a writer when I grew up! In elementary school and junior high I was obsessed with books, and I read all the time. My mom used to help me keep a diary of all the books I read, and we’d fill up entire notebooks. My best friend, Monica, and I wrote plays together and performed them – sometimes ourselves and sometimes with our Barbies. My parents diligently videotaped and kept them all. In high school, I had one really horrible English teacher in 11th grade, and I decided I was never going to write again. I thought I might want to become a doctor or a hospital administrator. Thank goodness, I took AP English in 12th grade with Mrs. “La” Lamberth, because she made me remember how much I loved to read and write. She used to make us memorize quotes from all the books we read for our blue book essays, and to this day, sometimes random lines of Hamlet still come back to me, which is why I knew Abby would have to read this in The September Sisters. Thanks to La, I majored in English at Penn State University, where I also decided to take some creative writing classes. As soon as I wrote my first short story, for my Introduction to Fiction class, I was hooked again, and I knew I had to keep writing. I took a few more fiction classes with the most wonderful Charlotte Holmes, and I ended up working with her and writing a short collection of stories for my honors thesis. This time my stories were about a soap opera actress who loses her job, an elderly lady with Alzheimer’s disease, and the father of a pregnant teen. I decided I would go to graduate school for creative writing, so I sent my stories off and applied to lots of MFA programs. I got rejected from most of them, but I got accepted to four programs. I also applied for, and to my surprise and great amazement won, The Jacob Javits Fellowship, which meant the government would pay for my graduate school. I ended up going to the University of Arizona, where I met and worked with some interesting people, including the incredible Aurelie Sheehan, whose kind words to me about my work would keep me writing even when I thought I should give up. While in graduate school I wrote a novel that got rejected by too many agents to count, and it is currently sitting on a shelf high up in my closet. After graduate school I taught some writing classes at The University of Arizona and at a community college in Tucson. After a year, the University cut back, and I lost my job. Suddenly, I had a lot of free time on my hands, so I knew it was time to write another novel. I wrote for a few months, sent a draft out to some agents, got rejected again. (This was the novel that would eventually become The September Sisters, but it would still take a little while for this to happen!) I got rehired at the University and forgot about the book for a while. I decided I might never be able to be a “real” writer, so I even took a class and got my real estate license! But in the summer of 2006, nearly two years after I wrote the first draft, I suddenly realized how much I missed writing. I took that book out, dusted it off, and started working on it again. In the fall of 2006, I sent it out to some more agents, and that was when the amazing Jessica Regel at the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency read the manuscript and said she wanted to represent me!!! After some more rejection (from editors, this time), and lots more revision from me, the book fell into the hands of the lovely Jill Santopolo at HarperCollins. Jill had suggestions for even more revisions, which I did, and Jessica sent the book back to her. Then I anxiously waited to hear what Jill thought. Three months later, in January 2008, Jessica called to let me know that Jill Santopolo loved the revisions and had made an offer on the book!!!! The September Sisters was released in February 2009, and my second novel, The Life of Glass, will be out in February 2010.
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