I've been writing since I first learned to hold a pencil. My first published work, a parody of a nursery rhyme, appeared in Jack and Jill magazine when I was in first grade. I didn't count that in my credits when I applied to SCBWI. Honest. In college I majored in English lit and minored in journalism, and had I been independently wealthy, I might have gone on to learn Anglo-Saxon and get a graduate degree in really, really early English literature. Alas, I had a loan to pay off, so after graduation I worked for a business textbook publisher instead. It was an incredibly boring job, but what I learned during my indenture paid off when I started freelancing, so it was worth it. Eventually I found a great job for a small newspaper where I could be a reporter and also take photographs. After I moved to Milwaukee from southern Ohio (I was chasing a guy; caught him, too), I took a job as managing editor for a national association, meaning I managed to get their monthly publication out each month along with Other Duties as Assigned (United Way campaign, tech support, managing a national convention). During this period, I started to collaborate with experts in their field on non-fiction books and I also wrote a nonfiction book of my own that was commercially published in trade and mass-market paperback, and the usual unpublishable first novel. When my day job literally Went South in 1994, I declined the opportunity to relocate to Nashville and moved into full-time freelancing, which meant writing just about anything anybody would pay me for, including lots of magazine work in the beginning, a textbook and classroom materials of all sorts for K–12. I also wrote short stories that all found homes in respectable literary magazines (!), and a middle-school novel which an AAR agent represented for 3 years but ultimately didn't sell :( I'm now seeking representation for Novel #3 and am in the early stages of Novel #4, a contemporary YA, hoping this time I'll finally have an excuse to include a character named Hroðgar (but probably not if I stick to contemporary YA).