Thanks to my grandmother, Nancy Woollcott Smith, I started out in life with the delusion that writing was a thing grown-ups did. Becoming a writer seemed almost as realistic an ambition as becoming an accountant, though less lucrative. That delusion led me to a couple of decades of irregular and mostly profitless work, but it's also kept me going.

In high school I wrote two novels with a friend. We passed chapters back and forth in between classes. They were written on paper, the first book long-hand, the second on computer. That was before the internet. During the fall and winter after I graduated from college, I wrote a novella/poetry collection, still unpublishable or at least unmarketable. I sent it to about a half dozen agents and collected their more-or-less gentle rejections.

At age 31, I launched into my current project, a multi-volume epic fantasy about the last generation of a land animated by dragon-gods. I set it aside when I had my first baby, and I'm not 31 any more. I've also written a stand-alone Regency romance, a historical fantasy novella, and a screenplay. I plan to complete the fantasy series by sometime in 2016, but the road of writing is never as smooth as I'd like it to be, so no guarantees!