Janni Lee Simner used student loan money to buy a computer and wrote every day for a year until she finished her first story.

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Current job: Freelance writer; fiction and some science, health and business writing.

"For publication, 17 years; but for myself, pretty much since I could hold a pen."

"I'd been writing stories all my life, but after college I found myself living on my own with no obligations except for a 9-to-5 job. I realized that there would never be a better time to start writing than right then. I also realized that I was a terrible procrastinator, and that if I didn't get started, it could be decades before I actually began writing seriously. So I spent the last of my student loan money on a computer and promised myself I'd write something every night, even if it was only one sentence. . . . A year and a lot of writing and rewriting later, I'd sold my first short story."

Titles include: "Secret of the Three Treasures," "Ghost Horse," "The Haunted Trail" and stories in numerous anthologies, including "Gothic! Ten Original Dark Tales."

"Madeleine L'Engle's 'A Swiftly Tilting Planet.' "

Tell us about your most recent book.

" 'Secret of the Three Treasures' is about Tiernay West, a kid who knows exactly what she wants out of life: to be a professional adventurer, just like the heroine of her dad's adventure novels. Even though she lives in an ordinary town — and even though she lives with her non-adventurer mom, rather than with her dad — Tiernay is determined to find adventure, and soon she's hot on the trail of Revolutionary War gold — and of her own family's history."

If you could be best friends with any of the characters in your book, which one would it be? Why?

"Tiernay West, professional adventurer, of course! I know that if I hung out with her, we'd always find something exciting, no matter how ordinary both our lives seemed."

What would you do together?

"Go adventuring! Unlike Tiernay's mom, I'd buy her a plane ticket to wherever she wanted to go. Nepal? Antarctica? Mars? We'd have an amazing time together."

"When I wrote 'Stone Tower,' my short story for the teen anthology 'Gothic! Ten Original Dark Tales,' I started off knowing only two things: that the main character, Tara, was trapped in a tower, and that it was terribly cold there.

"I had no idea how she'd gotten there, or why she was trapped; I had to write the entire story to find out. Writing a story when you have no idea where you're going is a lot like jumping off a cliff — fun, but scary, too."

"That none of us are really alone. As a kid, seeing characters who were a little like me in the pages of a book meant that there must be people like me out in the world, too, and that one day maybe I would find them (or maybe I already knew them, without realizing it). That thought was hugely comforting."

Why do you think reading is important?

"It shows us a world beyond our own lives. And it also gives us hope that in our own lives, we can make it through, just like the characters we're reading about. And it gives us somewhere to escape to while we're doing all this."