10 Mar How did you get into writing? Did you aways want to be a writer?

It was a very long and twisty road, and the answer is no. I did grow up writing and won writing contests as a young person, but I never thought of it as a “thing.” What I wanted to be since a very young age was a ballerina. Ballet was the focus of my young life, and I spent the holidays dancing in The Nutcracker and summers away studying at dance camps. After getting sidelined as a teen by an injury, I knew that a professional career was probably not going to be in the cards for me. I graduated high school and headed off to Smith College. 

While visiting my family during spring break that first year, I was talking with my dad about how great novels are a lot like a roller coaster with all their twists and turns. I’d always been a reader and loved disappearing into fictional story worlds. Right then and there, I blurted out, “I think I want to write a book.” I wanted to create a roller coaster ride like the ones other authors had created for me. 

My dad said, “Okay, I’ll make you a deal.” I was supposed to spend that summer working as a bank teller—a job I had done the summer before and was bad at (I’m terrible with math—probably because I was always reading during math class–and bad with names and faces). Dad said, “I will pay you what you would have made working at the bank if you write your first novel full-time this summer and treat it like a job.” Deal! Of course, I had forgotten that Dad had signed me up to study economics, of all things, for the first part of the summer at Oxford University. I went to the U.K., came home with a suitcase full of books (this was 1989—no internet), and got to work. No one told me two months probably wasn’t enough time to write an epic, sweeping historical novel about the Neolithic people of Stonehenge…. so I did it. Granted, I had no clue what I was doing. And it was really bad.

A few years ago, I came across my rejection letter from Writer’s House — a top New York agency I submitted the book to around 1991 in an effort to get an agent. I did everything wrong. You weren’t supposed to bind it (I bound it) or put a cover on it (I put a cover on it with a picture of Stonehenge so they’d know what the book was about). The letter said: “Even after reading the 23-page synopsis [insert silent scream here—never write a 23-page synopsis], we still aren’t sure what this book is about… Your plot lacks tension and your characters are two-dimensional… But, it is strangely reminiscent of Clan of the Cave Bear.” 

WHAT?? Clan of the Cave Bear was one of my favorite books as a teen! 

That’s all the encouragement I needed. I was definitely going to do this again. I worked on another novel–another historical fantasy–that I never finished (but maybe will some day) and then the idea for this supernatural suspense came along. A tale about a fallen angel telling the story of his life since before the creation of time up to the present. I wrote that book in a few short weeks around 2000. It took six years to sell. That book became Demon: A Memoir, my first published novel and my first bestseller. I sold it in a three-book deal that included Havah: The Story of Eve (for which I had only a single page written that became the Prologue) and a third “you’ll think of something” book that became Iscariot: A Novel of Judas.

Pictured above: Babes in Toyland. I was past the injury but mostly retired from professional ambitions. I did continue to perform and dance through college and even into my 50s.