Welcome to my blog!

My name is Kristi and I am a compulsive writer.  Really.  I can't stop.  Some people can't stop smoking, drinking or eating.  Some compulsions are less damaging.  My sister can't stop cleaning.  (Unfortunately I do not suffer from that particular compulsion, as my friends well know!)  No, my obsession is writing and I haven't decided yet if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

It may sound like an innocuous activity, but it makes for some very late nights, time spent away from family and a less than thrilling social life.  Still, I can't stop and the reason I can't stop is that I love it.  I love it even when I'm writing crap.  I love it despite all the rejections and harsh critiques. 

So for the past few years - okay, thirteen years - I've been writing novels.  I've played around with romance, literary fiction, historical fiction and even a young adult novel.  Writing a novel is similar to designing and constructing a skyscraper.  You take elements - plot, characterization, voice, tension - and try to construct something solid, something believable.  If you fail, the whole thing sort of collapses in on itself. 

By novel number three I felt comfortable in a book. I found ways to hold it all in my head and make it stand up straight.  By book four, I learned to make my characters a little more lively than spilled coffee but it wasn't until book five that I really found my voice.  Maybe I'm a slow learner!  In any case, that book, The Corpse Goddess, will soon be released by Evernight Publishing. 

I can't say that I've mastered the medium, the structure that is a novel, but I'm getting better with each book and I console myself with the knowledge that very few writers ever master the craft of writing.  That doesn't mean I can stop writing and it certainly doesn't mean I won't have some fun with it!  And really, that is the reason I'm here today, creating a blog on my new website.  When I wrote The Corpse Goddess, I stopped trying to be a 'good writer' and had fun with the story.  I still followed the writing routine I'd established, but I allowed myself to be silly on the page, to drag my characters through the unexpected.  Now I can't seem to stop having fun and interesting characters are jumping onto the page every day. 

 The only real surprise is that most of my new characters are, well, dead.  It probably shouldn't surprise me that I write about dead people.  As an Air Force brat I spent my entire childhood following my parents through castles and ivy covered graveyards, down stone staircases into dank dungeons in countries all over the world.   Since then I've made many trips, to many different countries, and I find myself writing about Valkyries and vampires, gods and zombies, ghosts and killer birds - and the young women trying to sort it all out. 

Writing is how I make sense of my world, and my world is apparently filled with nether-creatures. 

The good news is, I'm not the only person haunted by the supernatural - even better, I'm not the only one who enjoys these hauntings!  Follow my blog and we'll talk about the living, the dead, the undead, and everything in between.  We'll also occasionally chat about writing and creating and how 'art' shapes our inner world. So follow me down into a few dank dungeons, let's dig down under things, find those nether-creatures in the dark and pull them into the light!