I was raised in Smithers, BC, Canada and lived there until I moved to Toronto at age 20. I had a brief and unsuccessful career as a fashion design student and, after I worked at a series of low paying jobs, such as server, record store employee, etc., I began a degree in English Literature at University of Toronto, which I finished at the University of British Columbia. After graduating I became an editor at a self-help/how-to book publishing company based in Vancouver.

When I was a kid I wrote fiction but gave it up for a life of crime (no, not really. Well, actually sort of) until I was about 26, when I started writing in the morning before work, first on the bus, then in a coffee shop. This writing became Alice, I Think, which was first published by a small Canadian press in 2000.

When I first started writing my intention was to write a book about a teenager who doesn't fit in, but doesn't allow that fact to crush her. The Alice MacLeod series is my homage to oddballs. I wanted to create a character who has the courage and integrity to find her own way and define herself independently of other people. I've always admired people who can do that.

A few years ago, I decided that my goal is to write every kind of book I love to read. After comedies, I’ve always loved horse books. I was a lunatic for horses when I was younger. I owned several horses (for a time when I was quite young I was convinced I was a horse, but let’s keep that between us) and I became obsessed with an equestrian sport called dressage. I quit riding when I left home for college, but part of me always thought I could have been a “contender”. (In retrospect, I’m not sure why I would have thought that.) Anyway, I got a nice payday when Alice, I Think was made into a TV series, and the first thing I did was rush out a buy a horse and start working on a book about two young dressage riders. The story was initially about two girls, but soon I fell in love with a secondary character, a boy named Alex, and the book became mainly about him. That is my fourth book, Another Kind of Cowboy.

In addition to horse books I’ve always loved detective stories featuring misunderstood sleuths. That’s where Sherman Mack, hero of Getting The Girl: A Guide to Private Investigation, Surveillance and Cookery comes in. I wanted the book to be a comedy so I didn’t want to include an actual murder. (There’s something not very funny about murder. Strange that…) Instead I decided that the crime he would solve would be a conspiracy involving social murder. I was murdered socially a few times in middle and high school and remember it feeling like the end of the world.

Next up is a memoir about my misspent youth. It’s called Nice Recovery. I’m not sure how it fits into my “writing all my favourite kinds of books” theme because I’ve never been one to go telling everyone all my humiliating secrets. But there you go…
To sum up this rather long-winded biography, I always tell people that if one person who's feeling isolated or left out reads my book and laughs and thinks "I'm not alone" or "at least I'm not that bad", then I've achieved my goal.

I'm married and my husband James and I live in Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island with our dog, Frank and an assortment of aquarium fish.