I live on an island in the Pacific Northwest. My town is often described as quaint, beautiful and quiet. That's polite speak for "this city is boring and there's nothing to do after 9 pm."

      I know this because my daughter went out the other night and was shattered that there was no bubble tea café open at 1 am. Luckily my son doesn't care about bubble tea and my husband doesn't know it exists.

      Bubble tea scares me, okay? It does. Sucking one of those gluey little balls up through a straw shatters my muse and makes me gag. So I don't mind living in a quaint, beautiful, quiet city where I can smell the sea and where bubble tea is only available during business hours. I don't drink it anyway. And, unless I want to torture them, my characters don't drink it either.

      By the time I hit Grade Four (long before somebody with very bad taste invented bubble tea) I knew I was going to be a writer. So did the teachers. It was the persistent daydreaming and invisible friends that tipped them off.

      Since I grew up knowing no writers - and consequently didn't know how to be one - I became a journalist instead. First in print and then on TV. Among other things, this meant wearing heavy-duty TV makeup and getting recognized in public (often when buying underwear). The upside (to the TV gig, not the underwear issue) was it gave me unlimited access to criminals, celebrities and basically anybody else I wanted to pester. And they had to answer my questions.

      To my disappointment, many of their answers were uninspired or heavily edited. I knew I could make up better stories than the ones they told, and I figured the end result would be way more readable and a lot more interesting. My bosses didn't buy it. Journalists are expected to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Which I did. In as few words as possible. As much as it almost killed me. For a lot of years.

      But when my first child was born, I traded one reality (criminals and celebrities) for another (diapers and drool) and decided to explore the truth in fiction. In other words, I was going to daydream for the rest of my life and get paid for it. So now I write books for teens and children, and the endings are always worth reading! When I want a break from the world of Laura Langston, I sometimes write as Laura Tobias www.lauratobias.com.

      I live in a messy yellow house with a pair of Shetland Sheepdogs, my high school sweetheart and my son. My daughter now lives in a big city where she can get bubble tea 24 hours a day.