The love of stories started when she was a toddler. Grandpa George would stay at the house to watch Angela while her parents were at work, and he would read to her. Once she could walk, she would toddle over to the bookshelf, pull out a book, toddle back to her grandpa, plop down on the floor, and shove the book at him until he read it. Once the book was read all the way through, she would take the book back to the shelf, retrieve another one, and repeat the process. This was the case until she learned to read herself, but still occasionally insisted that her grandfather read to her.
As she grew older and gained a handful of siblings her grandfather would gather the grandchildren close and encourage them to make up their own stories. The children would sit on the back porch with a treat and each take turns adding a line to the story. This sparked the notion of creating stories within her. As the spark festered, she read every interesting book she came across. She was ahead of her reading level in class, and she could pronounce the more complicated words better than the other children. She only struggled with vocabulary words by mixing up the definitions.
There were several instances where she got in trouble for reading during class. She did not want to participate in math after the alphabet was introduced to the regular equations and the science equations put her off the science exercises. She completed her work in class as quickly as she could so that she could get back to reading her books. The practice of finishing her work before everyone else allowed her to read more in class without her teachers getting mad at her. This practice persisted throughout the rest of her education.
She enjoyed practicing her penmanship in both cursive and print, her handwriting changing to a combination of the two styles over the years. She enjoyed reading history books because of the stories held within. She was a favorite at the school library, checking out a new book every few days. Some days she finished a novel in eight hours and would come back into the library the next day for a new one.
She was ten years old when she started writing after watching a favorite television show and imagining herself as a character within. She started writing her own version of the show with herself, interacting with the characters, and going on adventures. With the first draft incomplete, she decided that she could write the story better and immediately rewrote it a different way. She would repeat this process and continued to rewrite the story before it was truly finished. By then the story no longer resembled a fanfiction of the original show but was its own story with only a handful of remaining similarities to the show. This was the beginning of her writing career.
She continued writing as she grew older. Some of her stories started off as fanfiction that she rewrote until the stories no longer resembled the original sources except for a few similarities and others she wrote from random imaginings or from real world inspirations. Her siblings became main sources of character inspiration, resulting in multiple characters being based on her siblings with adaptations. She let her siblings decide some of the details about the characters she based on them.
The first novel she published she finished writing when she was seventeen. Multiple publishing houses refused her manuscript until she self-published with an online publishing company that allowed her control over her royalties and allowed her to design the book cover. She dedicated the book to her grandfather who passed away shortly after the novel was published. Her profit from the novel was little as most people who purchased the book were her relatives, but she was thrilled and relieved at having accomplished writing and publishing her first novel.
As she finished high school and worked small jobs part time, she began her book collection made up of books she had already read and enjoyed. By the time she arrived at university she had a collection of fifty books that made up her personal library. She studied literature and creative writing, hoping to improve her own writing. She wrote down the stories that she and her siblings had made up with her grandfather as kids, publishing them as short stories once her youngest sister finished the artwork for the manuscripts. These stories were also dedicated to Grandpa George.
After she graduated from university, Angela sought out job opportunities that would allow her to write. She hoped for a well-paying job that would allow her to pay the bills while she wrote her own stories on the side. She had difficulty finding the right job. She ended up working as an editor of formal documents at a business company, which paid her well enough but drained her energy and she stopped writing for pleasure.
She continued to read when she could, collecting more books so that her personal library included more than one hundred and fifty books. Reading helped soothe her ache for stories, but she felt herself growing antsy after going so long without writing. After some encouragement from family, she managed to write a short story, though it physically hurt to write after going so long without writing. She continued to write, working on more novels and short stories, and the pain gradually faded away. She found that writing was a muscle that needed regular exercise and writing for short periods each day helped.
She wrote a little every day and read every chance she could, working the routine into her daily schedule to soothe herself and reenergize after a draining day. She met a nice man, Jeremy, at Barnes and Nobles. He was interested when she rambled on about the books she read or was writing and asked her out on a coffee date. Dating had been a struggle for years prior due to her dates not being readers or more interested in other hobbies. Some of her dates claimed she read too much, and others disregarded her reading hobby as something to grow out of. Jeremy did not read as much as Angela but did enjoy reading. He appeared enthralled by whatever story she ranted about. He never interrupted her stories or seemed frightened by her book collection when she showed him. He often asked her to talk about stories she was passionate about and they spent many hours discussing her books and reading together.
He took her to Barnes & Nobles on a handful of anniversaries and let her pick out as many books as she wanted to add to her collection. He never complained. On their fourth-year anniversary he proposed as soon as they got home from one such trip and they married a year later. He installed a large bookshelf in their home that held her growing collection of over two hundred books, including her own published books, while she was pregnant with their first child. When he showed her the library he had built for her she wept and kissed him.