When I was a kid, I worked as a clerk at my parent's motel. From when I was eight or nine, I rented rooms, helped with laundry, folding tons of towels. And then I also worked at my dad's gas station more as a young adult and as an adult.
Like me as a teen - and like many teenagers now - my characters are at a peculiar crossroads in their lives. They desperately seek freedom. But at the same time, they are constantly thwarted.
Some of my best book recommendations have come from booksellers.
'Daughter of Smoke and Bone' is one of my all-time top YA fantasy trilogies, so I was a little nervous about reading 'Strange the Dreamer.' Of course, I shouldn't have been worried because Laini Taylor immediately grabbed me by the proverbial lapels and refused to let me go.
I grew up in an isolated town, out in the middle of the Mojave Desert in the middle of a naval base. My family was one of the only South Asian families in this town. We felt it. We knew.
I've loved mountains since I was a girl, and when I discovered mountaineering fiction after college, I was hooked.