Hi there!

Be wel­comed. I’m Amanda, and this is where I would usu­ally put the stan­dard list of adjec­tives that describe who I am, but really only one mat­ters at the moment: I’m a writer. Not as pro­lific as I’d like to be, and with plenty of room for improve­ment, but there we have it. I write New Adult Fiction about women just start­ing on the “real adult” path, and about mar­ried cou­ples try­ing to travel that path together.

Why New Adult? I may still be search­ing for what feels “right” as my writ­ing voice, but I’ve always teetered between writ­ing Young Adult and “reg­u­lar” Fiction char­ac­ters and nei­ther felt quite nat­ural to me. At 28, I haven’t been a young adult in some time, and yet I’m still not con­vinced that I’m an adult. New Adult seems to be that miss­ing 20-​​something stage in life. I write mar­ried cou­ples because I haven’t been sin­gle since I was 16 years old, even if we only mar­ried about 7 years ago. That said, I still love to read about char­ac­ters falling in love, so there’s some of that, too.

My genre of choice is Fantasy. My sto­ries are usu­ally filled with some sort of magic, roy­alty, faeries and corsets. If you notice the pic­ture above, part of this love of fan­tasy sto­ries extends into our real life a cou­ple times a year as we explore the grounds of a Ren Faire or two. It’s a lot of fun, espe­cially when they let you hold an owl (for a price, of course ) ¹

When I was a kid, I wrote my first sto­ries using mark­ers and lined paper cut into small squares while sit­ting in the back of my par­ents’ van. The one story that I can remem­ber was about a boy and a girl who found an aban­doned cot­tage in the woods and had to defeat an evil witch. By sev­enth grade I was finally into read­ing, it had always been a strug­gle, but around age twelve some­thing finally clicked. I read tons, but I had lost the writ­ing bug some­where along the way. In ninth grade I was bit. I wrote short sto­ries, snip­pets, and a few novel length works. Almost all of it was *NSYNC fan fic­tion, and some of it was pretty good. Most was bad, very bad. I’m not really that upset that I lost it all in a hard drive crash after we moved into our house.

After I grad­u­ated high school in 2002, I all but stopped writ­ing. I’ve been strug­gling ever since, but I’ve always loved it, and always felt it’s pull. In my last year of col­lege, I allowed myself the treat of tak­ing a cre­ative writ­ing class. I adored it. As soon as I grad­u­ated, I par­tic­i­pated in NaNoWriMo 2010, and that was my first, and only, win.

I’m still work­ing on the story that evolved out of that year’s NaNo. It’s my big work in progress, ten­ta­tively titled The Traitor’s Heir. Right now, I’m work­ing on a shorter story that isn’t so heav­ily planned out, and with­out the pres­sure of want­ing to pub­lish it. To get him back is a way to get the words out again. I need to find my voice, and to get over the men­tal hur­dle of think­ing of writ­ing as a treat.

Writing and read­ing to me are as essen­tial as water and air. It’s time to admit that, and drink like I’ve been wan­der­ing the dessert for eter­nity and have only just now found an oasis. This blog is the prod­uct of that wan­der­ing journey.