Lydia Joyce http://www.lydiajoyce.com Books: Shadows of the Night, March 2008 Voices of the Night, March 2007 Whispers of the Night, July 2006 The Music Of The Night, November 2005 The Veil Of Night, April 2005

Lydia Joyce

When I was very young, I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be a grandma. After all, grandmas don't have to work, they enjoy the company of children whenever they desire, and whenever they don't, they send them home to their parents. I would wear a large-old fashioned hat, have salt-and-pepper Gibson girl hair, and grow roses.

When I discovered that grandma-ing was not a career, I settled on writing as second best.

I began dictating my first stories to my mother before I could write. I filled notebooks in elementary school, and in middle school and high school, I wrote over 800 manuscript pages in my spare time as well as four plays that saw production.

Yet I never seriously considered writing as a career after elementary school. Writers starve, I was always told; a writer makes a decent wage about as often as pigs fly. And I wanted to make money, so I moved from Texas to Indiana to enroll in Purdue's engineering program.

I hated it.

Finally, I decided there was a good deal of difference between being good at a thing and liking it and that liking it was more important, so I left engineering. After changing my major a second time, I still managed to graduate in four years with majors in English and Spanish and a minor in religious studies—and almost another major in creative writing if illness hadn't prevented me from completing it. Meanwhile, I wrote three manuscripts and began submitting them and collecting rejection letters.

After graduation, I married a wonderful computer scientist  I met my sophomore year, and so far we have one son, "the Bear." I got published a year and a half after graduation, with my first book releasing in 2005.  Since then, I have completed six books and aim to have finished at least 12 before I turn thirty!

We started out in New Mexico, where I renovated a house amid other insanities.  We're now living in the Washington, D.C. area, where I write full time and homeschool the Bear.

Visit her website at www.lydiajoyce.com.