Lydia Joyce
http://www.lydiajoyce.com
Publishers: NAL/Signet

Lydia Joyce began dictating her first stories to her mother before she could write. She filled notebooks in elementary school, and in middle school and high school, she wrote over 800 manuscript pages in her spare time as well as four plays that saw production. Yet she never seriously considered writing as a career after elementary school. Writers starve, she was always told; a writer makes a decent wage about as often as pigs fly. And she wanted to make money, so she moved from Texas to Indiana to enroll in Purdue's engineering program.

After a while she decided there was a good deal of difference between being good at a thing and liking it and that liking it was more important, so she left engineering. While pursuing a dgree, she wrote three manuscripts and began submitting them and collecting rejection letters. After graduating with majors in English and Spanish and a minor in religious studies, she married a wonderful man she met her sophomore year, and so far they have one son. They're now living in the D.C. area, where she writes full time and updates her website as frequently as possible.

She got her first contract in the late spring of 2004, two years after she graduated from college, and she's hoping to sell many more books! In addition to writing, she is a competitive ballroom dancer as well as a sometime gardener.