So uh, what do you write?
YA sci-fi/fantasy, baseball mysteries and grocery lists. (Plus, the occasional greeting card and cat-centric song parody.) My debut YA novel just sold to Curiosity Quills - look for it on the shelves in Winter 2014! Previously, I created the Cat McDaniel Mystery Series starring a rookie sportswriter out of her league in a corrupted baseball industry. As for grocery lists, well...they're mostly full of candy.
Have you always wanted to be a writer?
Not really, I was pretty content being a reader. It never occurred to me to try the other side until I wanted to read something that hadn't been written yet.
Why the genre shift? YA sci-fi is a long way from sports mysteries.
Like most authors, I write what I love. I wrote Cat McD because I love baseball. But I also love monsters, portals, robots, magic(k), mythology, temporal folds, comics, spaceships, fictional languages, futuristic technology...basically anything that would solidify membership into the Tri-Lambs.
Quick: favorite sci-fi or fantasy TV show!
Uh, uh, uh...Fringe? No, Supernatural! BSG! Dr. Who? Firefly! Wait, Buffy! Angel! (Can we just agree that Whedonverse counts as one?) The Walking Dead! Game of Thrones! Please don't make me choose.
Why YA?
Young Adult, not unlike young adults, is unpredictable. Coming from the mystery genre, that's very refreshing, as mysteries are very formulaic, with lots of rules, such as: "the murder must occur within the first twenty pages," "the protagonist must be noble and just," and "no monsters." But with YA, anything can happen at any time: girl can meet boy on the first page and girl can kill boy on the last page... because girl is really a bloodthirsty chupacabra. I also love writing as a teenager because it makes me feel like my own teen years were just yesterday. (Actually, they were 4,000+ yesterdays ago, but who's counting?)
Who's your favorite baseball team?
The Cubs. Go on, make your jokes - but be warned, I've heard them all before.
How did you get your agent?
The old-fashioned way: queries, queries, queries. You can read my journey here.
Will you read my manuscript and refer me to your literary agent?
I completely understand and I've been there - but the truth is, I can't recommend something to my agent without reading it and I'm afraid my schedule doesn't leave much room for extra reading. Plus, I suck at critiques so it wouldn't be worth the wait. But I can direct you to a starting point for your agent quest: QueryTracker. It's a wonderful resource that allows writers to find agents in their genre, track their queries and interact with other agent-seeking writers. You can even read my success story here.
