Tanya gets her love of reading from her mother, although she reads all fiction genres, while her mother was more of a Fabio cover reader. She credits her dewy—yet pasty—complexion to Mary Kay Cosmetics and more than a decade of night shifts at a job involving more physical than mental skills, allowing her time to talk to the people in her head.

Her early report cards were full of complaints about her daydreaming and lack of hand eye coordination. The latter was due to undiagnosed nearsightedness, but she wonders now if she was already making up stories.

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Tanya is not a plotter, and prefers to write herself into a corner, requiring plot twists that even she doesn’t see coming, and makes use of her many flaws to provide quirks for her characters. Anxiety, panic attacks, and weird energy levels have all found their way into her stories. The first time she saw her name in print was in grade five, when she’d written a Christmas story that was published in the local paper. She regrets faking a belief in Santa Claus, and also that no one bothered to correct her typos, leading to a version of the word “cookies” that borders on the pornographic.

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In a defiant “hold my beer moment”, her body decided to develop vitelligo at the start of the Covid pandemic, despite it being a rare disease that seldom strikes after the age of forty. Her other superpowers include an almost perfect estimation of the current time, the ability to pour an equal amount of beverage into two cups without measuring, and the skill to always pick the slowest check out line in the grocery store, (which isn’t an issue now that she can shop before the store opens). While she has a compulsive need to be early for everything, she balances that with a level of procrastination that borders on the ridiculous. Once she wrote a short story during her other classes and handed in at the end of the day.

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A firm believer in soulmates, Tanya has been married to her first boyfriend for nearly thirty-five years, gaining both a husband and a waterbed in the year 1989. Although she still has both, neither husband nor waterbed have all of their original parts. She and her husband have four daughters, and she predicted that as a result, she would only have grandsons. She was correct. However the count only sits at two grandsons, since her daughters prefer pets to procreation, and as she tells her offspring, three grand cats, and four grand dogs do not count. Despite the fluffy extended family members, Tanya’s pets are a ball python named Dude, and a ginormous red-tailed boa named Jake. Based on size, Jake and Dude are probably female as well. Although she’s moved several times, Tanya has always lived within a 100km radius of her birthplace. She doesn’t get out much and is currently living in the same town where she attended high school.