OK, correction: it's easy to write about yourself when you're a writer and it's disguised as fiction. This is not to say that what I write is thinly veiled autobiographical stuff -- except, of course, when it is.

But I digress.

I grew up in Delaware, the First State, and, more importantly, the Home of Tax-Free Shopping. I earned my B.A. in English-Journalism at the University of Delaware, Home of the Butt-Kicking Chicken (slang for our mascot, YoUDee, which is, yes, a chicken). After a miserable stint as a journalist at a small newspaper in Indiana, I ran screaming back to the greater Delaware area and saved up enough money to go to graduate school. I earned my M.F.A. in creative writing at Emerson College in May of 2001, just two days before I sold Bringing Up the Bones.

I am a dork. This is something all of my friends will tell you. When you are young, being a dork is a terrible burden. But the older you get, the more you realize that dorkdom is often a great predictor of success as an adult. At least, this has been my experience.

Writing. I think I've been writing nearly all my life. When I was eight I used to spend the summer "working" in my mom's office, writing knock-off Nancy Drew stories on the typewriter because I loved the sound of my fingers banging on the keys. In high school I wrote some really bad fiction and some even worse poetry, but I spent most of my time working on marginally good plays.

In college I sort of stumbled into journalism. To borrow a phrase from Laura Lippman, with whom I worked while interning at The Baltimore Sun, I wanted to be a writer with a steady paycheck. I spent much of my college career sweating blood into The Review, UD's student-run newspaper. Unfortunately, I didn't find real-world journalism nearly as satisfying as my time at The Review or as rewarding as my internships at the Sun or The News Journal, Delaware's largest daily paper. Eventually I had to face facts and acknowledge that what I really wanted to do was write for television.

Huh? you ask. In addition to being a dork I am also a certified pop culture junkie. So yeah, I wanted to write TV shows like my all-time favorite, My So-Called Life. This is what I was planning to do when I got to Emerson. Instead, I ended up in an Adolescent Novel Workshop taught by Lisa Jahn-Clough, and the rest, as they say, was history.

So many young adult authors have said they didn't start out wanting to write for the genre -- Francesca Lia Block, Sarah Dessen, Rob Thomas, Nancy Werlin, Ellen Wittlinger, and even Paul Zindel, to name a few. And I can't speak for all of them, but I'd guess most of these authors thought they were writing for "big people" when some smart agent or editor said, "Hey, you should rework this manuscript for teens." And if they were anything like me, hearing this made something click. In my opinion, there is no better audience to write for. Perhaps this is because, no matter how old I get, I feel like I live in a state of arrested adolescence. Or maybe it's just because the issues that most teenagers deal with don't go away once you turn 20 -- if anything, they only intensify and grow bigger.

And that's my story.

Want to know what I'm up to on a day-to-day basis? Check out my LiveJournal, which I update regularly.