Introducing Kate, the newest OA blogger!

 Hello! Greetings! 

I’m thrilled to be here to introduce myself today and to join this amazing team of bloggers. I’ve been a long-time reader of Operation Awesome, so after many years of gobbling up the useful information shared here, I thought it was time to give something back.

My name is Kate and after spending most of my life moving from country to country (Austria, USA, Samoa, China, the UK, Australia), I now live in New Zealand where I work in the film industry.  As you might guess, I love film almost as much as I love books.  In fact, our annual film festival just finished and I saw 22 films in 17 days.  Heaven!

I have two sons, one who is eleven, and the other in his first year of high school – which is a great source of research for me as a YA writer.

I write contemporary YA that tends to focus on difficult or challenging subject matter.  My debut novel, An Unstill Life, deals with coming out and euthanasia, and my second published novel, Stumped, is about sex and disability.  I am currently working on a new novel instead of polishing up the six already-completed novels hanging out in my hard drive, and this one is about a boy being bullied and physically abused by his girlfriend.

My role here at Operation Awesome will be to take over the Dear OAbby role and to do synopsis critiques on occasion.  So if you have burning questions you need answered about writing and publishing, or are struggling to put together a compelling synopsis (aren’t we all????) please fire them my way.  I can’t wait to see what gets thrown at me.

And finally, a few useless, but possibly interesting facts about me to round out my character:

• 1I have a broad and eclectic general knowledge, something that serves me well at the weekly pub quiz some of my workmates and I attend.  It also served me well when I was on the Australian version of television show The Weakest Link - I came second.  I would have won if I'd known something about playing Bridge.
• My favorite vegetables all begin with the letter A – asparagus, artichokes and avocado.
• I have two cats called Frankie and Lola.  A third cat, Alfie, lives down the road, but seems to think he lives here and just comes in and makes himself comfortable whenever he likes.  I never know if there will be two or three cats waiting for breakfast when I get up.
• Odd numbers make me anxious (hence this fourth point).  I won’t stop reading a book, even if I’m exhausted, unless I’ve read an even number of chapters.