Erica Danekes

Erica discovered writing for entertainment after a local newspaper journalist visited her sixth grade class during career week. He spoke at length of his joy of writing, of being able to create a story his readers would enjoy, while at the same absorbing the importance of his article.

Up until then, she had viewed writing only as the physical act of putting words on paper through use of a pencil (pen if it was a final draft). But writing was never fun. It was school essays and had the added difficulty of being left-handed. She still doesn’t hold a pen “right” but has adapted to having her paper sideways so her hand doesn’t smear her words across the page.

Discovering writing could be fun opened a whole new world for Erica. She promptly began writing murder mysteries inspired by And Then There Were None and Clue. Not really knowing what she was doing, she based her characters on her friends and classmates. Those same friends and classmates quickly demanded to be written about properly, so most became married to their current Hollywood crush. Oddly, some also had very specific instructions on how their character was to die.

The more gore-than-plot stories slowly gave way to romance novels. Erica feels she has hit her stride writing about the rose-colored side of life. It’s not all sunshine and butterflies though, she still has a mean streak and some of her characters suffer greatly, and at the hands of those who should love and support them the most.

Erica always seems to be on the go. Some days she is amazed by her own popularity, but loves having the vast pool of people to pull character traits from. This means, woe to thee who pisses her off. It does not tend to end well. For them at least. And to be fair, little pieces of herself pop up in her characters as well.

She also enjoys a wide-range of reading material, including non-fiction enabling her to sprinkle accurate tidbits throughout her books. (Research on tallow candles was a real eye opener!)

When the characters aren’t playing well with each other (or Erica) she’ll turn to her other interests including LEGO building, video games (she can rock a battle ax) or baking. Such activities require concentration and focus, but also allows her to ponder a sticky plot point or argument if she needs to.

She does find it funny that the only time every single character leaves her alone is when she’s at the gym. Apparently even fictional people don’t like to sweat. That’s fine with her as she’s left in peace to murder the calories she enjoyed earlier in the day.