Blog — Kristin Bassani

Hello Internet, it’s me, Kristin!

After graduating with a degree in Fiction Writing from the University of Pittsburgh, I knew I wanted to be a writer. Scratch that, I was already a writer—I knew that I wanted to be a PUBLISHED writer. Thus my journey began. I worked as a waitress, a video store clerk (Hi, Randall from Clerks), a pharmacy tech, and an insurance underwriter. During that time I worked on draft after draft of my first novel. It was a paranormal romance, and within a year of its completion, a new TV show came out that had a scarily similar plot. So, I gave up.

At the time, my critique partner told me he would read anything I wrote, as long as it wasn’t sci-fi, so I set to work on a new YA fantasy. But no matter how hard I tried, the plot magnetically drew toward sci-fi. Instead of fighting it any longer, I let the words flow, genre be damned.

That turned into In This World or the Next. Over the past two years I’ve revised, gotten tons of feedback from beta readers and critique partners alike, and I’m finally winding down on what I hope will be the final revision before I can jump into the query trenches.