“Once upon a time there was a girl who loved to write books…” No. No. NO! That’s all wrong. This is supposed to be short story written as a first person narrative, telling the world about me the author.

Good grief—how boring is that? Do you like the picture of the Author in her natural habitat?

Pretty exciting, eh?

For some reason they won’t let me use this photo as my author photo, even though it perfectly describes my style.

So anyway, I began writing in the 1980’s when I was a single mom raising my kids. It was the era of Reaganomics. I had to hold down three part-time jobs just to keep a roof over their heads, food on the table and clothes on their backs. We didn’t have money to buy books, and we read them faster than the library could stock new ones. I couldn’t afford to put cable in the house, so we got only 2 channels on the TV, one of which was PBS.

So, I began writing short stories, sitting at the old secondhand IBM Selectric typewriter my dad had found for me at an auction. I would write fairytales for them and epic fantasy short stories me while they did their homework. Sometime I would write after they were in bed.

When I look back now, I realize that most of my work was fan-fiction of the great authors I admired. I just didn’t know it.

In 1998 I got a PC. My writing life really kicked into gear then, as my last kid was in high school and I was bored. I still couldn’t find books I liked, so I began writing the sort of book I wanted to read. That novel may never see the light of day, but it is dear to my heart.

2009 came along, and my nephew and I thought it would be fun to build an old-school RPG on the order of the early Square Soft and Enix games. (Did I mention I am a Final Fantasy Freak?) We bought the software, and I wrote a storyline for it. I began drawing maps and such—but my nephew ended up getting too much work in his real job, so that ended up not happening.

What did happen, was I turned my storyline into the TOWER OF BONES series. I have been writing in that series ever since, as I love the world, the people and the whole concept.

In 2010 I heard about NaNoWriMo through a gaming website I was writing fan fiction for. I used that month to write ‘The Last Good Knight’, and was picked up by a small publisher. That relationship didn’t go so well, but I learned a lot.

The main character in my most recent book, Huw the Bard, began his life as a side-character in that early book. I liked him so much that I gave him his own book. Now I have unpublished The Last Good Knight, and it has been completely torn down to the chassis, and completely rewritten, with some new chapters added, and some old ones removed. It has a new name, Julian Lackland, and will be published in 2015.

I have been the Olympia, Washington regional municipal liaison for NaNoWriMo for the last two years. I love NaNoWriMo and what it stands for—getting people out there writing. Not everyone has what it takes to be an indie published author, but everyone has a story.

So, now that I have bored you to tears with all this blah-blah-it’s-all-about-me, I leave you with one last favorite self-portrait –that of my highly abused teacup.

I believe in living life on the edge…of my couch…with the controller in my hand…grinding away until my characters can beat the c**p out of the evil bad dude.

Then I write stories…..

(To find out more about Connie and her stories (and published books) click HERE – TSRA)