Megan Frazer

Here is the official back of the book biography:

Megan Frazer is an author for young adults. Her first novel, Secrets of Truth & Beauty, was published by Disney-Hyperion in July of 2009. She lives with her husband and son in Maine where she is a high school librarian.

Here is something a bit more rambling and in the first person:

I’ve always loved writing, so I think in some ways it comes as no surprise that I ended up here. Of course, there were other things I loved as a child, like singing and dancing, and yet I am not in any way shape or form doing that, and the thought of singing in public makes my whole body tense. As a further tangent, my first career aspiration was that of Solid Gold Dancer, and if they really want to bring back a great show from the past, that would win my vote.

But back to the writing. I was lucky enough to go to an elementary school in New Hampshire that really promoted writing. We would write stories and then “publish” them by copying them into a book that had a cover made out of wallpaper scraps. Normally the student wrote his or her version, and the teacher would write a corrected version above it. I had no interest in publishing something with errors, and insisted that only the correct version be included.

I was also very into writing poetry. Here’s an early masterpiece:

Oh Halloween, what a night!

Trick or treating in the pale moonlight.

But I’ll be careful for there just may be

A little ghost following me!

I decided on writing as a career in 6th grade after a class writing assignment in which the teacher read us the beginning of a story, and we had to write our own endings. I liked my ending better than that in the actual story.

What kind of writer I wanted to be varied over the years. There was a phase where I wanted to be the next Torey Hayden. I wanted to be a screenwriter. In high school I read first Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War and then Beyond the Chocolate War (which I liked even better than the first), and thought, There need to be more books like this for teens. And though I strayed from the path of writing YA for a long time, I finally came back.

I studied writing in college, which was very useful, but I also went to a college that required you to take classes in a wide range of disciplines, and that was perhaps more useful. When it comes to being a writer, I believe the more of the world you are exposed to the better. I have traveled to places out of my comfort zone, and, even if I never write directly about these experiences, I am sure they inform my writing.

I wrote Secrets of Truth & Beauty while living in Boston (well, actually, Cambridge and Somerville). Most of the first draft I wrote on the train while commuting to my job as a high school librarian in the city. My then fiance, now husband, and I moved to Maine, got married, and shortly after I sold the book to Disney-Hyperion. Almost two years after that sale, in July of 2009, Secrets of Truth & Beauty will be available in stores