J.C. Harker All the Comfort of YA With a Bloodbath

About Me

I was born in 1983 in Poland and grew up surrounded by my dad's "hard sci-fi" collection. It's no wonder then that fantasy and science fiction quickly became my favourite genres.

In between devouring tons of books and first attempts at writing my own stories I discovered this exciting new thing called a computer. The fascination with games and code would eventually turn into a career, but I still kept writing. To add to my geeky interests, as a teenager I started playing tabletop Roleplaying Games (Cthulhu, Vampire: the Masquarade, Earthdown, etc.) and even some Magic: the Gathering.

While in high school I won a spot at the Children's Parlimentary Session with one of my essays. Around that time I also had my first encounter with the publishing world - one of my short stories was selected as a winner of the Polish literary competition called Lipa. I also completed a short movie script for a sixth sense like story.

As back then I wrote in Polish a career in web development seemed like a much more sensible option. So for a good few years my writing slowly diminished in volume. Until in 2006 I moved to the UK and started writing in English, though mostly articles rather than fiction.

But once a writer, always a writer. Around the same time that I renewed my RPG habits I was introduced to the wonderful world of Indie publishing. I had a story to tell and as I've published non-fiction not long before, I knew the platform for fiction was there too.

This was how Dragons Reborn begun. I took a stab at the novel (then called "White Pilgrim", but now planned as "Fish out of Water") during NaNoWriMo, but I realized I didn't have the technical skill in English to tell that story. The novel(s) would have to wait. Thus begun the work on several shorter stories that would introduce the massive and complex world and setup the scene for the story I initially set out to tell.

Bio

Joanna is the author of the epic fantasy series Dragons Reborn and an urban vampire thriller serial - Vampire Bytes. She lives in Reading, Berkshire in the UK with her partner and two Maine Coon cats. When she's not busy writing "YA with a bloodbath" as her sister once put it, Joanna enjoys designing book covers and solving problems with code.