Contests and Publication History

My YA novel, The Art Of Selling My Sisterfinished in third place in the 2007 RWA Chick Lit Chapter’s “Get Your Stiletto In The Door” contest and came in forth place in the 2008 RWA North Texas chapter’s “Great Expectations” contest

My short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in ShatterColors Literary Review, The Hiss Quarterly, The Deepening, and Shine Journal.

About Me

That’s me as a little monster. As you can see, I started reading at a very early age.

I’m invading your TV and you don’t even know it!

I’m 29 years old and live just outside NYC. I make my living as a freelance computer animator. Chances are you’ve seen my work on TV. I’ve worked on the graphics for CBS Sports (including the 2007 Superbowl–all those little graphics that pop on screen and tell you the score? I created them), USA Network (ever see a screen with tune-in information telling you what’s on next?), truTV, MTV. Aside from TV, I’ve worked on a CGI Barbie movie called THE BARBIE DIARIES. I’ve also done visual effects for several TV pilots, none of which were picked up. And a number of commercials you probably fast forward through.

This is all part of my plan for world domination. Start with infiltrating the TV, then move on to book stores. After that, it’s just a matter of sitting back and waiting. (Okay, I’m kidding about this last part.)

ABOUT MY WRITING

When not brainwashing you with pretty animations, I spend all my spare time writing. This means I often neglect my husband, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He has his “video games.” I also neglect housework or other unimportant things like sleeping.

I started writing since I could say my first word. I wasn’t too impressed with the name my mom had called herself, “Mommy,” so I made up my own replacement. “Bobu” seemed a much more appropriate title at the time. It’s no surprise that I had an imaginary friend with magical powers (she could walk through lava. How cool is that? Though, not terribly useful growing up in NJ). I wrote and drew a picture book series about my magically enhanced friend as soon as I could string coherent sentences together. It only escalated from there.

When I was 7 I wrote a non-fiction book called BLOOPERS, BLOOMERS, AND GRANDMA that chronicled the funny mishaps my real-life Grandmother encountered, from the perspective of her granddaughter. In high school, I kept notebooks full of poetry, song lyrics (even though I had no musical talent what-so-ever), and short stories.

I wrote my first novel when I was 17. This was before I learned about things like plots or character arcs. The book was 75k of existential ponderings (after all, we’d just finished studying Camus and Hamlet, and they deeply affected me). The book lacked a plot, wasn’t separated into scenes, and none of the characters had names. It did have a premise though, miraculously.

It was about a girl struggling to deal with her impending graduation and trying to grasp onto memories because life as she knew it would change forever once she left high school. Coincidentally, I was also about to graduate high school. Who would have thought, right?

Luckily I had the good sense never to revise this, though I do regret making my poor mother read it. She loved it. But she doesn’t have the best judgement, she also proudly displays all my childhood artwork at home and in her office. Some of that stuff is not fit for public consumption.

I made better decisions in college except some of them were still limited by my lack of knowledge of the publishing industry. I wrote a book called PREMATURE EVACUATION about a girl whose spiral into underage drinking causes her sorority to lose their charter/house and she must face down her former sisters and confront her problem plus, you know, fix everything. This, thankfully, was NOT based on personal experience. This book taught me about how a first draft does not equal a final book.

By the time I finished revising, only one scene remained from first draft to final draft. I wrote a kick-ass query letter and had an 80% request rate. But I kept getting the same reason for rejection: too edgy for YA, too juvenile for adult and college-set novels are hard to market.

After the crushing rejections, I spent a long time researching the publishing industry and the YA genre, devouring as many YA books as I could read (approx 75 books a year). I subscribed to publisher’s marketplace and started analyzing the types of books selling. I networked with other writers and started to make a name for myself, working on short stories while I educated myself and selling a few of them.

I wrote THE ART OF SELLING MY SISTER, which came close to getting published. Then I wrote ALICE IN WONDERLAND HIGH. The story of my writing journey for this book is located here.

I’m now represented by Sarah LaPolla at Curtis Brown and very excited to be submission with Alice!