From Sherwood Smith's website:
I don't like putting personal information on-line. I don't think the details of my life are relevant to the books, but sometimes young readers are doing book reports and need to include information about authors, so here is my standard "biography":
I am a middle aged woman who recently retired after twenty years of teaching. I have been married for nearly thirty years. We have two kids, three dogs, (two of them rescues) and a house full of books--about ten thousand or so. That's because my husband is a professor, and I studied history in graduate school, and we both love reading!
I started writing novels about another world when I was eight, but the work was so hard I switched to making comic books of my stories. (I actually began making little books when I was six and seven, out of paper towels taped together.) I went back to novel writing when I was ten, and I never stopped. I tried sending out my novels when I was thirteen. I typed them on a manual, and wow, did that take a long time, especially since I was (and am) a terrible typist. I got letters saying "We almost bought this..." and "Try us again!" but nothing sold, so when I got to college, I figured I needed to learn something about writing that I just didn't yet grasp. It took fifteen more years to begin to learn about rewriting, but meantime I went to college, lived in Europe, came back to get my masters in History, worked in Hollywood, got married, started a family and became a teacher.
I discovered that studying history was a good thing for an author, because I learned how cultures are shaped, how people thought, acted, ate, and lived in the past. I learned what they really did, how, and most important, why. Reading history, plus getting one's own life experience, is the best way to help a writer create characters that are true to life, instead of copying them from other writers' visions in favorite books.
Wren to the Rescue was first written when I was seventeen. It was one of the ones I sent around all through high school, though in those days it was called Tess's Mess. It was the first one I sold after I began the long road (still on it!) to learn how to rewrite. Since then I've published over twenty-five books, many of them translated into other languages, like Russian.
