This Writer

Some people meditate. Others climb stiff crags. I write.

I was born a long time ago in a really cold Canadian city, and I spent most of my growing-up years in a slightly less cold Canadian city before finally getting tired enough of scraping ice off the car windows to move to the west coast. Now I live in Victoria, where the winter is still cold, but at least you can keep the chills at bay with a cup of coffee and a good conversation. And believe me, I have a lot of those.

I’ve always been a big reader, but I kind of did it all backwards. I started reading adult fiction like The Stand when I was in elementary school and only got around to books like The Hobbit when I had reached adulthood. My favourite books as a child were Harriet the Spy, The Magic Faraway Tree and Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. Now that I’m supposedly a grownup and have to work all day, it’s hard to find time to read as much as I’d like to.

I had firmly decided I wanted to be an author by the time I was in grade 2. I wrote stories and poems all the way through junior high and high school, and I was editor of my high school newspaper. Everybody told me I should be a writer. But I thought if I was a writer I’d never make any money, so in university I took a different direction, first completing a degree in Psychology, then another one in Education. I taught middle school for a few years, which was a lot of fun. But still I wanted to write. All the unfinished novels inside my pile of coil notebooks told me so.

So I took an evening course in journalism and started writing for magazines. I taught by day and wrote by night. Eventually it got to the point where I had enough writing work to leave teaching. Two years after making the jump from the classroom to the keyboard, I signed a contract for my first book. That was in 2009. Now it’s 2013, and I’ve just finished my ninth book.

Five more things: I’m a Sagittarius. I live small so I can travel wide. I like jazz. I think a lot, and I’ve just realized that I like to spend time with other people who do, too. Summer is nice, but I like the winter sky better.