Meet Nicole

When I tell people my dream is to become an author, they always stare at me strangely, as though authors are strictly the eighty-year-old librarians from their school (no judgement if that’s you though). For some reason no one can grasp the concept that perhaps a 26-year-old girl has wanted to be an author for as long as she can remember.

Why is that?

I’m sure some may have plenty reasons as to why they find it odd, but for me, let me begin by sharing why I chose this career path. When I was only seven years old, I started reading novels. I was in the highest level of reading by the second grade. While the other kids preferred playing video games on our long family road trips, I was sitting in the back lost in a book, eager to finish it before we arrived at our destination. I don’t remember the exact point in my life where I knew I wanted to be a writer, it was something that I feel like I always had in the back of my head. There’s just something about introducing a reader to a fictional world that you have created. No matter what I was going through, no matter how late at night it was, I could get trapped amongst the pages of any book and find myself being an observer to a story that felt so real to me.

My goal has always been to create a world for a lost teenager to fall in love with. A world that she can use as a form of escapism from the day to day issues that arise in her life. It’s tough work I must say, and even after studying a Bachelor of Creative Writing and writing numerous short stories, the more bestsellers I read, the more I feel as though the little girl with glasses who spent every night falling asleep with a book in her hand is incapable of achieving such things. But what I have learnt over the years and after many drafts of my novel, is that if you want to be a good writer, you simply have to believe in yourself, work hard and create the best piece of writing you have ever created.

And here I am doing just that.