About the Author

The short version:

Virginia thinks dangling from the tops of hundred foot cliffs is a good time. She also enjoys hauling a fifty pound backpack all over the Grand Canyon and sleeping under the stars. Sometimes she likes running for miles through the desert, mountains, or wooded flatlands, and she always loves getting lost in new places where she may or may not speak the language. 

From surviving earthquakes in Japan, to putting out a small forest fire in Montana, Virginia has been collecting stories from a very young age. She works hard to make her fiction as adventurous as her life and her life as adventurous as her fiction. Both take a lot of imagination. 

She recently moved to Winnipeg with her husband (a Manitoba native) and their dog.



The long version (for people who are either quite bored, or extremely curious):

Virginia has lived in seven states and five countries. When people ask her where she's from she generally stares at them with a look that says, "you had to start with a hard question, didn't you?" If she's feeling succinct she replies with Colorado because that's where she went to high school, learned to drive, and fell in love with the mountains. If she's feeling long winded she'll actually tell you all of the places she's lived (sometimes even in the right order) and then you get to nod along and smile and regret that you ever tried to make small talk. She was a teacher for ten years. She likes to explain things.

Virginia has wanted to be a writer since the age of 13, though she started crafting stories and putting them on paper long before that.

Behold Virginia's first book! This was written (in crayon no less) in first grade.

One of the stories from said book! Virginia takes particular pride in the creative spelling. It's not even phonetic, it's just insane.

Luckily, her writing has improved considerably over the years. Sadly, her ability to draw has not, and that is why she hires other people to make her covers.

Virginia graduated from Georgetown University in 2004 with a degree in Spanish language (with a focus in linguistics), and from there she went on to teach languages (mostly Spanish but periodically English or others) for the next ten years. Her teaching career allowed her time to write, and in January 2006 she published her first short story in The First Line. In the same month, she published another story in Adventures for the Average Woman (now defunct). Then, in 2007, she signed up for National Novel Writing Month (heretafter to be referred to as NaNoWriMo), pushing her to write over 50,000 words of a novel in November of 2007. Which, in turn, enabled her to complete a first draft of a novel for the very first time in her life in 2008. (Prior to that she had started many of them and completed precisely zero.)

Since 2008, she has finished the first drafts of five different novels--four of which are actually decent enough that they may one day see the light of publication--one of which exists as a constant reminder of why no one else gets to read first drafts. 

Of the four that have publishing potential, Blade's Edge is the first to make it to the status of real book. It began as a NaNoWriMo first draft in 2009, and then sat in a figurative drawer (Virginia writes most of her long form fiction on the computer) for a few years, until, in a fit of challenging herself to actually revise something enough for publication, Virginia submitted the first chapter to JukePop serials. JukePop accepted the first chapter, and then she was responsible for posting all subsequent chapters as she revised them. She was still teaching full time at the start so, for a while, progress was slow. But the story gained readership, started to do well on the site, and eventually gave her enough confidence to decide to make a go at publishing the book independently. 

To practice the whole independent publishing thing and make sure that she knew what was required, Virginia published Rain on a Summer's Afternoon: A Collection of Short Stories in July of 2014. This process taught her a lot. Particularly about the importance of having a nice cover, having an editor, and learning the ins and outs of formatting.

Virginia knew that, unlike her collection of short stories (which she produced entirely by herself with absolutely zero overhead), she wanted Blade's Edge to be as professional as possible. But, she also knew that she didn't have the money to pay for a cover artist or copyeditor... 

Enter Kickstarter.

Virginia started a Kickstarter campaign to fund the independent publishing of Blade's Edge, and, on October 8th 2014 the project closed out with 107% funding. The next few months were whirlwind of rewriting, revision, and professional editing, as well as getting artwork from the extremely talented Juan Carlos Barquet, cover design from Design for Writers, and, finally, formatting. 

Then, on January 23rd of 2015, Blade's Edge was finally released to the world in both print and ebook formats. (The gratitude she feels towards her Kickstarter backers should not be underestimated.)

Virginia continues to work on polishing up the remaining publish-worthy novels she first penned during her teaching career, as well as new stories that occur to her on a daily basis. She is lucky enough to have switched to writing full time as of June 2014 and she hopes to release at least one more book in 2015.

If you have questions about Virginia or her work please use the contact widget on the righthand side of this page. --->