To truly understand the genesis of this book series, you must understand my parents.

It almost feels as though the events of recent years have ripped off the plot to what I hoped would remain a mostly fictional story.

A few thousand years ago, someone, or many someones, had a story to tell.

There is a giant box at our local recycling center for the books in the community that no one wants.

If there is anything I've learned over the past year, it's that connection is the key to creative success and that we are not traveling this moonless road alone. Not even close to it.

I’ve stared at it for three years, wanting nothing more than to find a route to the top. The other day, we finally set out to accomplish that goal.

When I am not writing about my own made-up worlds, I’m out exploring the real one.

We have so many opportunities in life to try new things and broaden our worlds, and so often, we make decisions in those first terrifying twenty minutes to quit because we are afraid to face plant on the cement.

Like most authors, artists, and creators, I wear many hats—writer, editor, podcaster, dog mom, Tyrannosaurus rex lover...you get it.

One of my favorite things to do when I travel abroad is to journal daily.

One of the first questions I get from people when they find out I’m a writer is about my routine—how I write.

Riding a bike is one of the greatest analogies for life, as I was reminded of last week during the festival.

At first, having other people read and judge my work was a terrifying thought. But hello! I wanted to be an author.

And while I did manage to hammer out a few good words, I also discovered that I was experiencing a little bit of writer’s block (I didn’t even get y’all a blog last week!).

And so inspired by my Christmas purchasing and shipping, I wanted to share my list of reasons books make great Christmas presents (And New Year’s!). And if you are motivated after reading this, there is still plenty of time for your bookish holiday shopping!

I decided to clean off my desk to prepare for this month-long book-production marathon and stumbled upon a poem my mom sent me a while back that I wrote when I was twelve years old.

“The Ringworm Jamboree.”

For the majority of my adult life, I held jobs that kept me fairly active. I was on my feet, moving around, talking with people, selling things, giving interpretive talks…I always maintained being in okay shape with a bit of exercise and some days of healthy eating. That’s just sort of how I always operated, and it worked well enough for me.

When I first started writing The Electa, I was beginning from scratch. Not in the sense that I had a blank piece of paper and a pen waiting to get to work, as that applies to all authors, but rather that I didn’t know a whole lot about the craft of writing or some of the elements of storytelling that need to be in every good book.

Being a writer can be exhausting. Not in the I just climbed a mountain or ran a marathon kind of way, but in the kind of way where seven p.m. rolls around and you can’t even form a proper sentence or spell the word your (you’re?) correctly.

When I wrote the first word of The Electa, I didn’t know a single person who was an author or even an aspiring author. That first word spilled onto the page, and I was off, frantically scribbling out 100,000 words of gold and garbage without any real guidance (other than Stephen King’s book, On Writing. Another must-read for hopeful authors!).