Meet Alma Alexander, Writer in Bellingham WA
LYING FOR A LIVING
There can be few vocations that take over a person’s life and being so comprehensively as a call to being a writer. Many hear it, but only a few persevere along the road to it, lined as it is with booby-traps and pitfalls; fewer still overcome all the obstacles between them and the dream and achieve the status of a published author. Only a handful make a living solely through this endeavour.
Alma Alexander is one of them.
Alma Alexander has been writing full-time for only ten years – but she has been a writer all her life, starting out by winning children’s writing awards when she was not yet a teenager and going on to become an internationally published novelist whose work currently appears in fourteen languages worldwide – languages which include Turkish, Hebrew, Lithuanian, and Catalan amongst the more mainstream Italian, Spanish, German and Portuguese (and similar) editions. Her best known work, “The Secrets of Jin Shei”, went into two reprints of the Spanish first-edition hardcover within five months of its release, and has been a steady favourite of book clubs everywhere. Alexander, 46, has recently branched out into the YA field, with “Cybermage”, the third and final volume in her Worldweavers trilogy from Harper Collins, released in hardcover in February 2009 (the first two books of the trilogy are “Gift of the Unmage” and “Spellspam”).
The author is also a teacher, who is an enthusiastic and welcome guest at schools, conferences, and conventions – where she has presented writing workshops, and participated in panels on the art and craft of writing. Having been set on her own path by an author visiting her own school when she was fifteen years old, Alma Alexander seeks to “pay forward” the passion, determination, and deep love of her work in the same way that they once inspired her to make her own career choice. “I tell tales,” she says. “This is what I do, who I am. I’m being paid to make up dreams and alternate realities – in effect, it’s lying for a living, but it’s the best job in the world and there is nothing that I would rather be doing with my life.”
The fanmail from her readers, aged from middle-schoolers to octogenarians, seems to agree with her assessment.
The Official Biography:
Alma Alexander was born in what used to be the country of Yugoslavia, on the banks of the Danube river, in a town with a strong literary history. She left the country of her birth at ten and spent the next twenty years of her life in several African countries, obtaining her education in the United Kingdom and South Africa, graduating from the University of Cape Town in 1986 with an MSc degree in Molecular Biology. She then took a different career path, starting out as a science/medical writer and editor and then following through into a full-time career as an author and novelist. She lives in the Pacific Northwest of the United States with her husband, two cats, and assorted visiting wildlife.
For more information visit: www.AlmaAlexander.com
Other Online Presences:
Website dedicated to the Worldweavers series: www.WorldWeaversWeb.com
Blog: http://anghara.livejournal.com
(Also participates in group blogs with posts on the 5th of every month at www.SFNovelists.com and on the 30th of every month at www.Storytellersunplugged.com )
Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/alma.alexander?ref=profile
