I have always written and always wanted to be a writer, but didn't think I could make a living at it. So I became a mime. (You can imagine what my father had to say about that.) I worked on the streets of NYC with two partners, stopping traffic in front of the Met and annoying tourists. When, to my great surprise, that didn't work out, I returned to school in film--thinking screenwriters made a living. And when I had ten scripts and my agent had stopped returning my calls, I wrote a novel. I did it just because I wanted to love writing again and not think about selling or casting or marketability. That novel was Skin Deep, and it's a testament to writing from your heart that the first person to read it, bought it. I've been trying to write from the heart ever since.