Tuesday 30 June 2015

Interview Q&A

Where have you lived, and how has this influenced your writing?

I have traveled far and wide, and lived all across the US. I like to set my novels in cities where I have lived. I grew up in New England, and was admitted to Northwestern University in Chicago. I studied literature there. After graduation, I waited tables and wrote in my spare time. I decided to move back home to Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts. I was there for a year doing social work but barely making ends meet. Then I took a well-paying financial job in St. Petersburg, Florida. All along I knew I loved to write, and writing was the only constant in my life. Finance did not appeal to me. I filled many journals with my writing. After a year living on the beach and typing away nights to NPR jazz on an old Smith Corona I bought at an antique store, I made a rather foolish decision to move back to Chicago. I swear the city was calling me! I would live in many different neighborhoods on the west side of town, from Wicker Park to Ukrainian Village to Humboldt Park. Again, working odd jobs and writing in my free time. I was going broke and broken-hearted a few years later, and well into my first novel, 'Girl Without Borders'. I felt like I had lost in love and life, yet I wasn't even thirty years old. It took me a decade to complete and self-publish that title, a literary fiction. I ultimately moved to Northern California, and lived in the Bay Area for a decade, ending 2012. I began writing 'Grand Theft Life' in 2013, an urban fantasy set in Oakland and the Bay Area.

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