About the Author

Amanda the Writer

One of my earliest memories is making a booklet out of construction paper stapled together and writing a story in it. It was called The Fat Green Cat, about (you guessed it) a fat green cat living in a barn with his large farm cat family. Although I don’t illustrate my stories in crayon anymore, I have been writing stories ever since.

After years of filling notebooks and, later, word documents with first chapters and story ideas, at 11 years old, I finally finished my first novel: Dragon’s Heart, a tribute to all the books that formed me as a writer and a young girl. A stubborn princess befriending dragons and undoing enchantments to find where she truly belongs. I published it in 2011, when I was 12 years old.

From there I started working on the story that would become The Brohorodan (a work in progress). After wrestling with it over several years and several drafts, I decided to try something new: writing short stories.

I wrote my first short story, Blood Mage, at the very end of 2021. The next one, The Red Hand, placed “Finalist” in Quarter 2 of the 2022 Writers of the Future Short Story Contest. Both Rain Flight and The Mortal Archive placed “Honorable Mention” in Q3 and Q4. Together these four formed my first collection of short stories, Red Leaf Falling.

Currently abiding in a troll’s cave in St. Louis, MO, I share this glorious adventure with my pet pig Puddle, mini aussie Ellie, and brilliant husband Dillon.