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WRITING When I was in fifth grade, I wrote my first book. (Thank you, Mrs. Bernard!) It was called Lorna in Rurak and was a fantasy loosely ripped off from the Prydain Chronicles of Lloyd Alexander and the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. Although I was only ten at the time, my main character, Lorna, was sixteen. I didn't know there was a genre called YA (young adult) back then, but I was already writing in it. In college, I had a fellow writing student say to me, "When are you going to grow up? Everything you write sounds like a teenager!" I was so insulted, even though I was nineTEEN at the time, that I immediately started writing dark and pretentious "adult" fiction. I wasn't very good at it. I stopped writing for a long time. I kept coming back to writing and learned that there was this thing called YA and that writers actually try to sound like teenagers. I got busy writing more of this YA stuff and in February 2007 sold FANCY WHITE TRASH to Viking. HISTORY I grew up in a small town about sixty miles of east Los Angeles called Norco. I attended Catholic schools - first St. Mel's elementary school and then Notre Dame High School. My mom was a dog breeder and we always had animals - horses, dogs, cats, rabbits, goats, cows, sheep, chickens, miniature horses. I love animals and feel very deeply for them which is one of the many reasons that I'm vegetarian. In 1995, I graduated from the Johnston Center for Individualized Learning at the University of Redlands in Redlands, California. (It's now called the Johnston Center for Integrated Studies.) I designed my own B.A., Women's Culture and Creative Expression, and met a lot of amazing people in my time there. After college, I lived in New York for a year where I met my husband. I returned to California and taught third grade for four years. In 2000, Michael and I moved to Miami Beach. We've been living happily ever after ever since.
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