Meet a Host (Amy)

Hi everyone! I'm going to follow Lea's lead and introduce myself as well.

So...hi! I'm Amy. I hail from the northwest suburbs of Chicago, but it's probably easiest to just tell y'all I live in Chicago. But I'm actually about an hour outside the city. I have two kids who are in middle and high school and three ahole cats. I mean, I love them, but cats are aholes, right? It's all about them.

I have worked in education for a lot of years. I taught high school English for a little over a decade. I LOVED it, but the grading load was rough, especially after having kids. So once I became a mama (and writing kind of entered my life), I got my Masters in Library Science and transitioned out of the classroom and into the library at a new high school. Fast forward a few years to this lovely pandemic we're all in, and my district (which is a K-12 district) temporarily moved me to one of our elementary schools for the year, but for a long list of reasons I won't get into, I decided I liked it better at the elementary level and requested to stay. So today I am an elementary librarian teaching five one-hour classes a day, but no more grading! Have I found that work/life balance yet, though? Not entirely.

I have always, always, ALWAYS been a reader, but the writing gig came a little bit later in life for me. Every time I finished a book that made me feel ALL. THE. THINGS...I always thought to myself, "I wish I could do that." Thanks to the high school I taught at for 13 years, I was inspired by a writing program we had there to try my hand at writing my first book. I happened to have another teacher friend who was doing the same thing, and we became each other's cheerleaders and critique partners. She wrote a YA vampire novel, and I wrote  a YA dystopian book, and NEITHER of us got those books published. LOL.

Then in library school I read a YA contemporary romance called ANNA AND THE FRENCH KISS by Stephanie Perkins, and everything fell into place. ROMANCE was what I wanted/needed to write. Through a blog contest, I won a chance to have an editor read my next manuscript, which was a contemporary college romance, and landed my first publishing deal with that story, which became my first book, IF ONLY. From there I got my first agent (I'm now with my second one), and 16 books later, I'm still at it, writing contemporary cowboy romance (that's a whole other story how that ended up happening) and contemporary women's fiction. I was in my 30s when this happened, folks, so no matter where you are in your writing journey (since I know some of you are), It can and will happen when it's right. I'm still working in education, parenting, and attempting to date (because divorced) so--yeah, still trying to find that work/life balance. ;)

I'm a fangirl. My kids and all share a deep love for the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe), so it's no surprise when about a year ago when Lea told me I HAD to watch this Kdrama called CRASH LANDING ON YOU, that my fangirl powers kicked in, and I was an official Kdrama stan for life. Kdramas are my happy place, my self care, my connection to friends I can only see via screens as well as my connection to a wonderful community that includes all of you!

Wow. That was a LOT. TLDR, I'm a mom, librarian, author, and fangirl. So happy to be here and so grateful you are too! :)