Hi, I’m Chantel! And here is just a little bit about me, and how I started my journey to become a published author. (And boy was it a long journey.)
I write Young Adult Fantasy and Sci fi, and may dabble in other genres should I feel inclined. I like to keep my writing pretty clean, meaning no gratuitous sex, gore, and swearing, because I want everyone to be able to enjoy my stories.
I didn’t realize I wanted, or even could be, a writer until my first year of college. Before then, I enjoyed composing little scenes while I walked or drove anywhere, and I even won a small writing contest in my high school drama class (yes, a drama class, and not a writing class, but that’s a story for another time, because the end of that story is kind of tragic.)
But I didn't fully realize I wanted to WRITE until lunch during University orientation at a truly magical school, Southern Virginia University, where I met some amazing women there who helped me realize that I wanted to write.
I was looking for a place to sit with my roommate, when we sat with a group of girls (Which was a big step for me, because I was a huge introvert, and socializing scared me), and that simple act of trying to break out of my comfort zone changed my life. We were getting to know each other at the table, and several of the girls said, “We’re creative writing majors.”
That floored me.
I hadn’t realized you could go to school to write creatively. I thought you just had to be a gifted genius to do so, and only then you could only write things akin to Hemingway, Faulkner, and Beckett. (Which goes to show you how little I knew of writing.)
But that simple piece of information lit a fire in me, and I started writing stories that very semester. I continued to write as I changed universities four times, finally landing at Utah State University, but I wasn’t planning on doing anything serious with my writing, even though I was an English major: I wrote to escape, and because it was now a compulsion.
I never did get my degree in English either, because I was told, very rudely almost halfway through the program, that I would need to pass several math courses to get my English degree. I was horrified. I specifically got into the arts so I could AVOID taking math! That nasty piece of news made me realize I didn’t need a degree to write books, which was fine, because all my English courses weren’t the type of writing I wanted to do anyway.
Literary fiction is not my jam. I didn’t thrive as an English major, and didn’t get good grades on my assignments, because I have a creative brain, and I wasn’t good at following literary formats, like argumentative style and writing essays. I didn’t like reading the books assigned in my classes. I loved reading Harry Potter, Hunger Games (Just the first two, the last one doesn’t exist) Eragon, Holes, Island of the Aunts, books by The Brandons (Brandon Mull and Brandon Sanderson. And I’ll throw Brandon Flowers in there, just because I love the Killers, and one of his albums is the soundtrack of one of my books.) I wanted to write messy stories about mermaids and leprechauns, haha. (Seriously, tho)
Don’t get me wrong, I love SOME of the classics (shoutout to Mary Shelley, Harper Lee, Alice Walker, L.M. Montgomery, Agatha Christie, and Jane Austen. Hmm, I just realized…all women. Interesting.) But my true love and passion is genre fiction, especially fantasy and scifi. So I dropped out of college, but continued writing.
However, meeting my husband, who is a little more than obsessed with me, encouraged me to publish, and so I quit my job and began trying to polish my writing in earnest in 2018. (It’s been so nice having a built-in cheerleader for my writing :))
And now here I am, on the cusp of publishing my first novel, (after a struggle with trying to get traditionally published, but that is another tragic story for another time,) and I’m excited, nauseous, and fighting against my procrastination that stems from terror to get this book out before this year of 2023 is over.
But as this blog post is already long, and I’m trying to keep blog posts short and sweet and save my long-windedness for my novels, I’ll share more about my publishing journey in the next post. See you then, and thank you for reading and learning a little bit more about me! Welcome to my journey, and I hope we’ll have an adventurous time!
All the best!
Chantel