# Please introduce yourself and your book(s)!
I am a young adult dystopian author. I self-published my first novel, Darkness Falls, in 2019. Since then, I’ve released three more books in the Nature’s Fury series. The fifth, and final, book in the series will release in 2021. The series follows two sisters as they are thrust into a hostile environment when Mother Nature decides to fight back against human destruction.
As a lifelong resident of Pennsylvania, I base my stories along the East Coast of the United States. My husband and I have two sons and three cats. Besides spending time with them, I enjoy exploring nature.
# What inspires/inspired your creativity?
Nature was the inspiration for my series. The environment has always been important to me and in recent years, I’ve grown more and more concerned with how people treat it. I worry about how much future generations will suffer for actions people take, or don’t take, now. When I became frustrated by instances of nature being exploited or seeing environmental regulations derailed, I poured those feelings into words. I started to imagine what could happen if Mother Nature fought back – impacting humanity like a series of dominoes, throwing one extreme event after another at us.
# What were the best, worst and most surprising things you encountered during the entire process of completing your book(s)?
The best thing I encountered during this process is getting positive feedback from strangers. It’s one thing when a friend or family member compliments your book, there’s certainly some bias there. But when someone you’ve never met reads your book and raves about it, that feeling is like nothing else. It motivates me to keep writing!
The worst thing I encountered is how slow the entire process is. I’m not the most patient person, and all of the steps involved in producing a novel are painstakingly slow. They are necessary, but I’ve wished many times that I could speed up each step. The editing process is my least favorite.
The most surprising thing to me was beta reader feedback. Each time I sent a manuscript to my trusted beta readers, I had in the back of my mind that they’d fall in love with it immediately and have no suggestions for improvement. That didn’t happen. Their feedback was amazing and improved my stories GREATLY, but I didn’t anticipate how many suggestions they’d have. I poured through hundreds of comments on each manuscript. I’m truly grateful for the resulting improvements, I just didn’t expect that each story needed that much work at that stage. (I can see now that they all truly did!)
# What are your plans for future books?
I have an idea for my next series, which I’m just starting to map out. It will take place in the United States about a hundred years into the future. I’m envisioning a world that has to take drastic steps to accommodate for an environment that’s been mistreated for far too long.
Along those lines, I’m also contributing two short stories to a climate crisis anthology that will be released in the fall of 2021. The book, Gaia Awakens, will feature stories from about a dozen authors and I’m thrilled to be a part of it!