Hello and welcome! Today is my birthday, and to mark the occasion, I’m launching this blog. And I’m launching a blog because I wrote a children’s fantasy novel, and it’s going to be published next year! After years of being extremely cagey about my writing, I’m slowly adapting to being an author in public. For those of you who know me, I’m glad you’re here! For those of you may not, here is a brief bio.

My debut novel is called Sparkers and will be published by Viking Children’s Books in the fall of 2014. It’s about a girl and a boy who forge an unlikely friendship when a mysterious illness strikes their city. It has plenty of magic, music, old books, and snow. Sparkers was a long time in the making, and I’m very excited for it to be a real book.

While I expect to blog about writing and publishing, I’ll also post about other things that interest me. Like maybe hurdy-gurdies. I’m a first-year Ph.D. student, an occupation whose side effects may occasionally include sporadic blogging. But please feel free to ask me questions in the comments, and if I can spin my response into a post, I will happily do so.