Hello, Karri. Welcome to Writing and Ranting. Why don’t you start by telling us when  you started writing? 

I started writing my first book about 10 years ago. It was a science fiction. I was about 65 pages in, and then our house burned down in the 2003 Cedar fire in San Diego. When we were evacuated, the fire hadn’t jumped the freeway yet. We never imagined our house would actually burn down, and the authorities only gave us ten minutes to grab what we could before we left. Our desk top computer was one thing we didn’t take with us. My 65 pages were ash.

 After that, I didn’t start writing again until after our house was rebuilt, and we settled into our new home. I gave up on the first book I started before the fires, and wrote another sci-fi, followed by a young adult paranormal romance, AMATEUR ANGEL, which became my debut novel. It was released in May 2012.

I’m sorry about your house. That must have been awful. Once you started writing again, how long did it take you to sell?

After my agent sent out my manuscript for AMATEUR ANGEL, it was months before we heard back from anyone. Finally, a publisher requested the full, and after several more months, they sent my agent a contract. During the whole process, my agent kept telling me that it wasn’t a bad sign that it was taking so long because the publishing business flows as slow as molasses.

 Molasses? LOL, that’s a good comparison. How did you sell?

 I met an editor at the San Diego State Writing Convention. She read the first 10 pages of AMATEUR ANGEL, loved it, but said she already had too much on her plate to represent it. She referred me to Kathleen Rushell, an agent with Marsal Lyon Literary agency, and Kathleen signed me after reading my manuscript. After it sold, she asked me if I was working on anything else. I told her about a sci-fi I wrote years before. I reworked that manuscript, changing it from 3^rd to 1^st person and adult to Young Adult, and it sold to Entangled Publishing in a three-book deal. 

I am so excited about my young adult dystopian MIRROR X. It’s the first in the trilogy, THE VAN WINKLE CHRONICLES, being published with Entangled Teen. The tentative release date is early December.

Random question: Avengers or Lord of the Rings?

Definitely the Lord of the Rings over the Avengers. Superheroes are hot, but nothing is hotter than a man with a broad sword, especially if he speaks Elven.