Hi there! I’m Michele.
Thanks for dropping by. If you write novels for kids, you’re in the right place.
I help dedicated middle grade and young adult novelists, like you, craft an exceptional, marketable manuscript without losing faith in yourself and your work.
Together, we’ll solve your story problems and transform your manuscript into a novel that’s ready for agents and editors.
If you’ve got a story that’s dear to your heart, one you’ve been wanting or trying to write for years, I can lead you out of that confusing forest.
I’ll serve as your guide to help you explore, excavate, and reveal the deeper meaning of your story, your characters, and all the emotional layers that your readers will LOVE.
Step by step, you’ll write, revise, and craft the novel you always dreamed you were capable of writing.
My path to this work
It wasn’t a straight line, for sure.
One fork led me through graduate school. In addition to master’s degrees in English literature and journalism, I earned an MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Studying how fiction works fascinates me.
The other fork led me through teaching and professional writing and editing. For 25 years I worked with writers as a teacher of college English, as a technical writer and editor, and as an editor of a college alumni magazine.
The transition from working with undergraduates taking a writing course because it was required to working with writers who cared about their work—that was a game changer.
Along the way, a few alums asked me to work with them one-on-one on their book projects. I started to think I could do this work on the side.
When I heard about a program that would teach me how to help fiction writers complete their novels, I jumped right in. I earned a certificate in coaching book-length fiction in 2021 from Author Accelerator. I’ve been working as a certified book coach since 2022.
My specialties
I’m especially good at helping writers figure out their story’s plot and how to marry their plots tightly to their characters’ motivations and desires.
In part, this is because I’m a writer myself. I write middle grade novels, usually mystery or fantasy, and often with an animal as a main character. I’m represented by Mary Cummings with Great River Literary.
It’s also because I am deeply attuned to mystery plots—and many plots are essentially mysteries. Something is happening in the background that the main character is unaware of.
Consider, for example, the adult characters in the Harry Potter series, especially Snape, whose love for Harry’s mother drove him to be Dumbledore’s spy in Voldemort’s camp. J.K. Rowling had to know a whole heck of a lot about her characters in order to know what to reveal to readers each step of the way.
I’ll serve as your guide to help you explore, excavate, and reveal the deeper meaning of your story, your characters, and all the emotional layers that your readers will LOVE.
Step by step, you’ll write, revise, and craft the novel you always dreamed you were capable of writing.
My history with mysteries
When I was 9, an aunt gave me several of her Nancy Drew mysteries, the original ones, which were first published in the 1930s. I became hooked on mysteries and have read nearly every kind.
I’ve also studied them. For my MA in English literature at Iowa State University, I did my thesis on female detective fiction, focusing on work by Sara Paretsky, Linda Barnes, and Sue Grafton.
Years later, for my MFA critical thesis, I wrote about children’s detective fiction, again focusing on female characters. I called it “Under the Magnifying Glass: The Making of Literary, Girl-Detective Fiction.”
What I love to read for fun
Mysteries, obviously. Novels with (at least) a dash of humor. Novels with fascinating layers of meaning. Current favorites include the Louise Penny novels for adults.
As a kid, I wanted to be either a detective or a spy when I grew up, so novels about spies grab me too—especially ones for kids.
When I’m not reading, you can find me in the woods near my house, skiing, biking, or walking with my dogs, Joanie and Chip.
