As I walked into my editor’s glassed-in office, my hands shaking, I couldn’t quite believe I was actually doing it. At the age of twenty-six, I was quitting what many considered to be a dream job.
I was a staff writer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Somehow, I’d been hired straight out of college when other young journalists were building up their clips files at small town papers. I also got to write kicky features when—according to the hardened news guys shoe-leathering their way through their days on the “Metro” section—I should have been paying my dues writing crime reports.
Instead, I was reviewing meals and shows I couldn’t otherwise afford, dressing up models for fashion shoots like they were my own personal Barbies, and getting articles published several times each week.
And yet, here I was telling the editor who’d given me my break, “I want to write books.”
A few months earlier, I’d heard about a colleague who was trolling the newsroom for fiction writers. He’d made a deal with a small publisher to produce three dozen horror books for children. Since he didn’t have the time to write them all himself, he needed ghost writers.
I bit, expecting nothing more than a fun gig that didn’t require any interviews or fact-checking. But after I conjured up a tale of a ten-year-old battling a “bog girl,” I realized I had a new calling. Writing fiction for kids fit me as well as my cutest, most comfortable pair of shoes. What’s more, I could do it from home. Or the coffeehouse. Or my bed! And some day, I fantasized, I could do it next to a bassinet.
So, I gave my notice at the newspaper. Wanting a more urban environment, I sold my car, moved to Chicago, and rented myself a garret. (Okay, a studio apartment.)
I sent Beware the Bog Girl—a cheap paperback written under an assumed name but a clip nevertheless—to a friend who worked at a publishing house. She passed it around the office and the next thing I knew, I had my first big gig, to write Clueless: Bettypalooza. It was pulp fiction for teenagers, a slanguage-filled, purely goofy paperback, and I loved writing it even more than my first book.
That set off many years as a scribbler-for-hire. I spent my days writing paperbacks that ranged from torrid tales about the witches of Charmed to a novelization of Charlie’s Angels. Within a few years, I had a full-time deal to write two media tie-in series—Spy Kids Adventures and W.I.T.C.H. The contract would amount to more than twenty books. I was set!
Of course, I had to churn out a 25,000-word book every month, which meant I was always on deadline. And since I was still single, that bassinet was eluding me.
And I had to contend with snarksters who queried, “Wouldn’t you like to write your own book? Y’know, one that costs more than $5.99?”
Sure I did, but I was also having a fabulous time writing these books. I (often) giggled my way through my workdays, inventing spy gadgets, writing snappy tween repartee, and mapping out action scenes that made me feel like a movie director. I was making a living as a writer—no mean feat, as any writer will tell you—and I was learning like crazy. Writing all those paperbacks helped me get the novel-writing thing in my bones.
I’d like to think that’s why the rest of my fantasies fell into place in one fell swoop. Just as my big book contract concluded, I fell in love with a man who lived in Atlanta (which also happens to be my hometown). Finally ready for marriage, I also felt ready to challenge myself more in my work. So, soon after I moved back South, I wrote a proposal for my first hardcover novel, a book about four Chicago girls who become unlikely knitting fiends.
