I cut my teeth on high fantasy. My dad discovered Tolkien when he was in high school and read the LOTR trilogy every year for 20 years. Some of my earliest memories consist of climbing into a wooden bunk bed (the eighties variety they no longer make for safety reasons) after the nightly argument with my sister about who got the top bunk tonight. My brother (who now has 5 children) was in a toddler bed across the room. My dad would sit with his back against the door frame and tell us stories of Frodo and the Black Riders. I was literally put to bed with stories of Middle Earth.

​

In grade school I picked up Lloyd Alexander and couldn't get enough. By the time I was a sophomore, I'd fallen in love with The Wheel of Time, which remains my favorite series ever.

​

Is it any wonder that I would eventually foray into high fantasy myself? When I first started writing, I had the entire genre up on a pedestal and was entirely too intimidated to touch it. But when I had a few books under my belt, and plenty of time to imagine a world of my own, my fingers began to fly over the keys.

​

I started small, with just a short story: The Hatching. I wrote it for a short story contest and received an honorable mention. Everyone who read it asked me the same question: Do you plan to expand this into a series?

 

Book 1 of Dragon Magic will be out early in 2020.