About the Author
A page of the author who is, of course, myself. Well, then, I was born some twenty-one years ago in Maine, grew up in upstate New York where my parents were going to graduate school at Cornell University. After kindergarten, we moved to Maryland, where I made my first forays into writing, with the elementary school write-a-book contest. My efforts won the school competition but were brutally disqualified from the regional because, and yes, this really was the reason, the cover was not hard enough. Broken hearted, I turned away from writing for, as best I recall, three or four years.
At the end of fifth grade we moved once again, this time going west to Colorado, where I began to write once again, at age twelve. Then, however I let nobody so much as catch a peek of any of my stories, a habit I am only slowly recovering from. All in all, I'm fairly glad I had it- looking back at what I wrote then, I'd just as soon have nobody but myself have to deal with it.
I wrote steadily through junior high school and high school, always fantasy, and slowly my world fleshed out around me. The one I wrote in, I mean. The real world was all there, though I noticed more and less depending on the day. In high school I made a couple good friends, had a couple fantastic teachers, and, my senior year, took a class called Senior Seminar, the last four or five week block of this was called Capstone. In capstone, each student chose what they wanted to do, and then they did it, keeping a journal as they went, setting goals for themselves and (hopefully) meeting them. My goal was to write a novel, something I'd started hundreds (literally) of times, but had never finished. That novel was the first version of Dreamquest which has since been edited to within an inch of its life. My teacher, I fear, never read it, which was a bit of a blow to my self esteem. But just the same, I had finished it, and others had read it, making it the first piece of my writing done ouside of a creative writing class that was read by anyone but myself, so it was all in all a good thing.
After high school I took a year of college during which I lost all focus, and did horribly in. I am now slowly regaining that focus, and working full time as a relay operator for the deaf and hard of hearing. I'm planning to go back to school and hoping to become a computer programmer. I do not intend, and have never intended, to become an author, as such. I have always written and I always will write, I have always wanted to be published (which looks now like its coming soon), and I hope to continue to be published after my first foray. I would love to be a well known author, though only if I was also a good one. I should like to write books that people pick up in the library saying its worth a try, then go out and buy. One day I hope to reach that point. But, as I was saying, I don't intend to be an author, because I don't ever want writing to become work. I will never stop writing, and I daresay once I get started, I will continue to submit things, if and when I finish them, to publishers, but I will never go professional.
More about me can be found out, if for some reason you are interested, on my main web page, at http://alestra.tripod.com.