At twelve, Kameron decided she was going to be a writer and live in a cabin in the woods in Alaska with a couple of dogs and chop firewood and haul small animals out of the field and learn how to cook. With this in mind, she wrote a book. It wasn't very good.
When she was fifteen, she decided to start submitting stories to people who might pay her for them. She started collecting a lot of rejection slips. She wrote a couple more books. They weren't very good either, but they had good fight scenes.
Somebody paid her $100 for some random thing she wrote for an English class when she was seventeen. A few months later, she got drunk for the first time at a toga party in Rome and saw some famous royal person in Monaco. She wrote another book. This one had guns!
She broke things off with an asshat who kept trying to marry her when she was eighteen, and then jumped off a bridge. In a good way. She started another book, but it was obviously crap, so she put it on hold.
When Kameron was nineteen, she moved to Alaska for two years, where the nights were long, the men were single, and the liquor, quite strong. She learned how to shoot a rifle and cook wild rabbit and rice.
Due to some trick of fate and a very useful waiting-list, she attended Clarion West when she was twenty. She started writing another book.
For the first time, at twenty-one, she traveled to New Zealand and South Africa. The flights were nightmarishly long, but the days in NZ were phenomenal, and the nights in SA, memorable.
At twenty-two, she moved to Durban, South Africa for a year and a half where most of the people spoke Zulu, the cockroaches flew, and rent on a one and a half bedroom flat was about $150 a month.
Six months after turning twenty-three, Kameron moved to Chicago and started taking some mixed martial arts classes. She discovered that right hooks are awesome and public transit rocks. She finished another book.
She started hawking her first novel at twenty-four. Though it was, by no means, the first one she'd written, it was the first one she was willing to show the public.
Twenty-five found her commuting a lot between NYC, Indianapolis, Dallas, New Jersey, and Denver. She didn't like any of those places.
At twenty-six, Kameron woke up in a hospital after passing out in her bathroom and was told she had Type 1 diabetes. Somehow, she finished writing another book.
She got laid off from her comfortable day job just before turning twenty-seven. Winter came and went and spring found her living in Ohio with a couple of dogs, a couple of jerks, and working as a tech writer at a financial services company. She has health insurance and makes more than 20K a year.
A month after turning 28, Kameron sold her first novel, God's War to Bantam Books. She moved into a place of her own, paid off some outrageous travelling debt, and got a huge raise. God's War will be out in the fall of 2009.
Which will be the year she turns 29.
She can't fucking wait to see what life is like at thirty.
