Birth, siblings, etc.

 

I was born January 17th, 1972, just north of New York City in Westchester County.

I'm the youngest of three; I have an older brother and an older sister. My mother is a librarian, and my father is a civil engineer.

 

Where did you go to school?

 

I went to high school in the Bronx, where my mom worked as the school librarian. Then I went to Princeton University.

 

Did you have any other jobs?

 

After graduating from college I went to China for a year to teach English. (I never realized what 1.2 billion people actually meant until I moved there. It made New York City seem unpopulated by comparison.)

When I moved back to New York, I got a job in publishing. After a couple of years I left to write a novel, and funnily enough, I ended up selling my book to the same company where I used to work. I've been a full-time writer ever since.

I also teach writing at The New School University in New York City.

 

What are your hobbies?

 

Not surprisingly, my favorite things have to do with stories: they're reading and going to movies. But aside from that, since I live in New York City I also go to a lot of theater and concerts and I even like opera. But whenever I get out of New York I like to do outdoorsy things: hiking, skiing, scuba diving, horseback riding...

 

Do you have any special interests?

 

I am fascinated by science (though not the math part of it-- I like the ideas behind the discoveries.)

 

Have you always wanted to be a writer?

 

Yes, I think I’ve always wanted to be a writer.  At least since I was about ten.  But the funny thing is, I didn’t do a lot of writing. I wanted to be a writer because I loved reading—and I did that all the time.  But writing?  Not so much.  I wrote essays and papers for school.  And I kept a kind of journal.  I started twenty pages of a novel when I was twelve, but that’s pretty much all the writing I did until college.  Princeton had a really good writing program, and I took classes and wrote stories there.  I found that at the beginning I needed a deadline to get me going.  It was at college that I wrote my first book as well (which is in a drawer at the moment, though I might rewrite it sometime.)  I wrote my first published book about three years after I graduated from college, and I’ve been writing ever since-- which is about 10 years now.  I’ve written 5 books so I guess I average about a book every two years.  And writing wasn’t just my first career choice, it was my only career choice.  I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to do.  I think that might be part of the reason I ended up becoming a writer.  It’s not easy, but if you don’t have a backup, then you don’t give up.

 

How many books have you published?

 

I have six books: four adult thrillers KILL ME FIRST, SAVED, THEY DID IT WITH LOVE, and THROUGH THE HEART and two YA thrillers JUDE and ECHO. I've gotten a couple of questions about the book FRAMED-- the story behind that is that it is actually JUDE, but they renamed it when they published it in the U.K.