With my latest novel, Stuffed Souls, coming out in the next few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about my teenage years. My mother always said she admired my fearlessness, but when it came to this particular classmate, my I-don’t-care-what-you-think-of-me persona struggled. She was beautiful, popular and excelled at torturing me. Oh, she could push my buttons, make my well-buried insecurities rise. As writers we’re always told to write what we know—so I did. In the first chapter you’ll discover I took that horrible girl and stuffed her soul into a doll. It was great therapy, but by doing so, something happened. My imagination just couldn’t leave her be. My mind nagged and nagged until I went back, taking what I thought was just a short story and creating a full-length novel. More than any of the other books I have written, this one stems from a piece of my own past, which is scary and exciting at the same time.