I've always loved stories, watching them, reading them, listening to them, and I've always been a storyteller, but when I was a kid I was sure I was going to do my storytelling through performing arts somewhere as an actress or dancer, probably on Broadway or maybe in movies!
When I was in elementary school, I wrote a radio show with my little sister and our friend who was in a different grade. We performed it over the intercom, live, once a week. It was utterly ridiculous and all the kids in our school loved it. lol
Flash forward to 2010. I'd given up on performing arts because I'd gotten caught up in some highly toxic situations and all my love had turned to hate. I was working at a high school trying to help kids that no one else seemed to think were worth helping.
I don't remember what I was researching on the internet when I found NaNoWriMo, but I decided to try it and suddenly I had a new way to tell all those stories swirling around in my head.
And that's how I became a novelist.