How a Fiction Writer Landed Her Dream Job (and Dream Life!)

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