About

The first story I ever told myself was an action adventure where Luke Skywalker rescued Wendy (of Peter Pan) from Darth Vader and pirates. I was five.

The first story I tried to write was a mystery-thriller which began when a Nancy Drew character discovered a hidden passage in my basement and rescued me and my best friends from kidnapping. I was nine.

The first story I seriously dedicated myself to and shared with others still sits in a folder on my computer, where I occasionally read through chapters with a mixture of embarrassment and admiration. Honestly, it’s not a bad start for a fourteen-year-old.

It gives me hope to imagine that if I showed a nascent writing ability at that age, the years since have maybe (hopefully) nurtured it into something more robust. I’ve certainly tried my best to bring it along.

I write all day every day, just not what I want to write (or in some cases, not what I should write). Mostly it’s marketing copy—a great job that’s paying off my student loan debt and teaching me a lot about how to grow and marketing a business over the internet. Useful information! And I get an inside look at all kinds of industries that help me understand how the world works and how people of all educations and backgrounds make their living. Also useful information!

But it’s a grind. Like the Beatles in Hamburg. I have a whole blog I want to write about that, and about marketing, too. Hopefully I’ll get to that later.

Before I went into marketing I did a lot of other things. I spent a year taking baking and pastry courses at community college, which I sometimes refer to as “culinary school.” I then went to Germany for a year where I worked as an au pair for a family with three children under the age of four. I spent three years living in Edinburgh and studying History and Russian, and one year in Perm, Russia, learning Russian. I speak Russian. Also German.

I freelanced for a while, and to some extent still do. While I was full-time freelancing, I spent a couple months in Austria, and then a couple months in Madrid. I like to travel.

All that time, I nursed each moment for experiences, ideas, memories I could call upon in my future writing endeavors. I’ve read extensively, and I’ve tried to learn as much as I can from the people around me—to understand mindsets and world views that differ from my own, and hopefully, to exercise as much compassion as possible toward people who are not like me, but still fantastic and wonderful in their own right.

I’ve also tried to keep various blogs going when I can, but they’ve each gone their own way. This is my attempt to create a blog just for writing. For me, as a writer. So that if I someday get published somewhere, and someone says to me, “Laura, where can I send people to learn more about you,” I have somewhere to send them.

There’s a lot more I could say, but I’m going to leave that to the blog. In the meantime, thanks for dropping in.