Ever since I was a little girl, I have loved to read and write stories. When I was around seven years old, my Dad brought home an Apple computer. This was the 1980s, way before the internet, and there wasn't much for me to do on a home computer. So I played endless rounds of Pac-Man. At some point, I got tired of chomping on Pac-Dots while being chased by ghosts and I opened up something my Dad called a word-processor.

 

There was nothing but a blank screen and a cursor. So I started to play the game the only way it seemed to work. By typing words. I typed little stories. I didn't know how to save them and we didn't have a printer, so when I turned the computer off, they disappeared. The next day I picked up where I had left off the day before.

 

Some days I let the story continue on paper. I filled up marble notebooks while lying on the scratchy green rug in my bedroom. I wrote about girls who could talk to wolves, who fought in civil wars, who could see their entire futures in the reflection of lakes. They were girls who felt far away from my small and quiet life, but I knew their hearts. We shared the same longing, wonder, and hope.

 

For a long time, I wrote like writing was the best kept secret anyone could have. Because it was. (It is.)

 

After college and graduate school, I moved to New York City. I worked on the sets of reality television shows, behind the scenes on  documentaries and ads, and, for a long time, at a toy company, where my writing, which began by playing on the computer, really became all about play. And every night I wrote stories in the dark, in secret, the way I always had.

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Now, those stories are published novels about girls with the same longing, wonder, and hope I've always had.

 

I hope you love reading my secret stories as much as I've loved writing them over the years.