Author of The Limerent Series
For as long as I can remember, I've told stories.
I was a Navy "brat" growing up. This is military lingo for saying the child of someone in the military. So, from the time I was born until about age 13, I moved every two years. I was born in California but lived in Corpus Christi Texas, Newport Rhode Island, Honolulu Hawaii, and New Orleans Louisiana.
As my sisters were already adults when I was a child, this meant that I was alone and the "new kid" at school every couple of years. This meant that I had to learn how to make a place for myself in new friend groups as quickly as possible, and if not, then I needed a way to entertain myself in the moments that I was without friends. I used stories to do both. I was often the "storyteller" in friend groups, whether that was making up scripts for game playing among banana trees in Oahu or reading HP Lovecraft stories over lunch to an ever-growing group of horrified sixth-grade classmates in North Carolina. During moves where I had a harder time making any friends at all, I wrote stories to entertain myself and cope with loneliness.
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While the situation that I was in growing up was a bit unique, the internal motivation to write was probably the same as a lot of people, which is feeling like an outlier in some way. When you feel like this, writing helps your sanity. It can be both a sword and a shield. I can also be a disguise. It's a way to say what you feel without having to say it out loud. It's a place to put your "unacceptable" thoughts or emotions. Your characters can rage, love, fear, and lose in the fiercest of ways, which would be largely incompatible with surviving everyday life. The themes you choose to pursue in whatever you write gives you a platform for your beliefs.
My life has been eclectic to say the least, I dropped out of school to form a band and had my 15 minutes of fame on MTV, returned to college and became a laywer, before moving onto working in banking to help start ups and then being one of the first employees at 23andMe, a genomics and biotechnology company.
That experience influenced the genetic aspects I write in The Limerent Series.
