Biographical Information
Thanks for your interest in my background. I grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. After high school, I studied women's history at Smith College in Massachusetts (class of '93) and earned a Master's in Creative Writing from Western Washington University.
I work now in academia, and spend most of my evenings writing fiction. Currently I live in Western Washington with my partner of eleven years, our two dogs, and the newest addition to our family, a baby girl.
The photo at the top of the page features my
first typewriter, an antique Corona that I bought at a garage sale when
I was fifteen and still possessed romantic notions of actually churning
out my first novel without a back-erase key. Fortunately, my parents
interceded and gave me an Apple IIE clone with a word processing
program. Whew.
My first published novel, Solstice (March 2010), deals with two of my favorite things: soccer and the city of Seattle. After college, following a hunch, I moved to the Pacific Northwest sight (site) unseen. I immediately fell in love with the water, mountains, and hills of the aptly named Emerald City. Seattle is also an awesome place for soccer players and fans, as evidenced by the tremendous fan support for the MLS expansion team, the Seattle Sounders. The Sounders weren't in existence when I wrote Solstice, or undoubtedly they would have made an appearance in the book.
Leaving L.A. (January 2011), my second novel for Bella Books, is set in Hollywood and Hawaii, places that vary rather significantly from the Pacific Northwest. The storyline is a bit like a tropical lesbian romance version of the movie Notting Hill. Pam Bigelow, a reviewer for the Lambda Literary Foundation, wrote a glowing review of the novel that closes with, "Leaving L.A. could very well end up as one of the ten best books of 2011." Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is the nicest thing anyone has ever said about my writing. Ms. Bigelow was kind enough to add her review to Goodreads and to the book page on Amazon, too.
My third novel, Beautiful Game (July 2011), returns to the world of soccer, and is set in the early 1990s at a fictional university in Southern California. Technically, BG is actually the first sequentially of the three novels--I wrote an initial draft in 1994 while living at home after college and saving up money to move to Seattle. Solstice comes next, penned in 1997-98 while I was living in Seattle, working at a software company and playing tons of rec soccer. Leaving L.A. is my latest completed novel, and was begun for NaNoWriMo 2009. Nothing like a challenge to get you writing!
Between 1998 and 2009, I wrote several other novels that do not fall under the lesbian fiction umbrella. They may, however, be candidates for revision and publication at a later date. Currently I'm working on Patron Saints, an LGBT-themed novel set in Scotland, where my grandfather, James Wallace Christie, was born in 1900. I traveled to Scotland a couple of times when I lived in London for a few months after college, and am hoping to go back again sometime soon.
That's it for now. These pages probably
won't change much until my next novel is released.
Except my Blog and Reviews pages--I'll try to update
content there regularly, as time allows. If you'd like to get in touch, you can find me on Facebook or e-mail me at katechristie8 at gmail.com. Thanks for reading!
