Depends who you ask. Among other things, she’s a wife, mother of three, and novelist trapped in the body of a full-time freelance writer. When she’s not enslaved by laundry or mopping up mysterious sticky substances, you’ll likely find her out on her daily run, hiding in her closet with her laptop and a bottle of nail polish, or out shopping while swearing up and down to her husband that she’s not out shopping. Melissa’s vices include red wine, cookie dough, Target, handbags, and pedicures. She lives in Cincinnati with her husband John, their three daughters (Savannah, Abigail, and Claire), and their underappreciated cat, Bodie.
A few of the quotes Melissa strives to live by:
“A writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing…scratch around in it long enough, pray and dig away long enough, and lo!, soon she will hit upon the marvelous.”
- Saul Bellow
“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.
- Vita Sackville-West
“The first draft of anything is shit.”
- Ernest Hemingway
Visit Melissa’s business site, Words by Melissa.
