Continent Hopping: Miami. London. Cape Town. MTV Books.

Wait, how did I get here? Let’s see…I took two jumbo planes across the world, sat with my kids as they watched Bee Movie seven times and landed on the tip of Africa, then waited….

I have wanted to be an author since my first grade teacher, Mrs. Peterson, published my picture book, “Mommy, I want to go to the Zoo” using her typewriter and lamination machine (okay, I know that dates me a little, but at least lamination machines are still in use, right?). Throughout the years, I’ve always relished fiction and tried to turn as many moments as possible into one that might involve creative writing. Like the time my high school physics teacher asked how he could get us to improve our test grades. My answer, by adding a creative writing essay question to the exam. And he actually did!

Then I went on to college, not to study science, obviously, but to major in creative writing. Afterwards, I continued on to graduate school, just in case I couldn’t find a job in creative writing and received a degree in marketing communications & advertising. Since college, and owing tons of money in student loans, I have worked as a copywriter, English teacher and tutor (even in science, I know, those poor kids). But something has always brought me back to fiction and since I’ve never left my teen years (helps that my youngest sister is seventeen), I love writing young adult fiction best of all.

So this brings me to my family trip in February to Cape Town, South Africa. We journeyed to my birth place to visit my grandmother. One day before heading to the beach (yes, the one in the photo pasted here), I decided to check my email. Everyone sighed, I was holding them up from serious tanning time. But there was a message from my lovely agent saying, well, what do you want to do? We had an offer from an editor at MTV to publish my first novel, Shrinking Violet. Hello, what do I want to do? Scream! This was the moment I had been waiting for and I got to share it with my grandmother (who died three weeks later). I spent the day at the beach, jumping up and down, with one of my sisters telling everyone that would listen, “my sister is going to have her book published!” The culmination of the day was when my six year old son made me a book cake in the sand. Chocolate or vanilla frosting, he asked? Both, I answered.

So in a way, it feels like I have traveled across the globe to join this awesome group of MTV writers!

And the moral of the story—if you want to get your book published, just hop a plane to Africa, duh! So where were you when you received good news?

Shrinking Violet is about a painfully shy high school senior that lands a job at a radio station and has to find a way to come out from behind her mask. It is scheduled for release Spring 2009.