Ellie Rose McKee asked Ellen B. O'Brien:

When and how did you start writing?

Ellen B. O'Brien The first story I have evidence of writing was some Elfquest fanfiction I wrote with my cousin. I was maybe 12 years old and we wrote it on a Commodore 64 in the '80s. I do have a dot-matrix printout of two of the stories in a folder somewhere.

I wrote a decent amount of anime fanfiction (mostly Ranma 1/2) in the mid-'90s to early '00s and then stopped writing for almost a decade. My desire to rewrite was rekindled when I found Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 2014, and over the course of the next decade I wrote about 1.6 million words of Spuffy fic.

I had not considered writing my own original stories until 2022, when I went back to school to study digital arts and took a screenwriting class. My projects for that class did not get turned into screenplays in the end, but they did get translated to romance novel concepts which I started working on for future publication. I was not very serious about it, though, until the summer of 2024, when I heard about the Vellys Awards that were being run through Kindle Vella. I quickly brainstormed the plot of Monsoon and started writing. While Kindle Vella shut down before I could finish the story, I kept writing and completed it in January of 2025. It's been making its way through editing and the remaining work needed for publication ever since.

In the meantime, I was invited to join the Monster Brides Romance community, which led to the writing and publication of Bites on Bourbon and plans for several more monster romance stories. So it's a complicated answer! I started writing a long time ago, but the road to publishing original fiction has been a long one. And I am fortunate that along the way I found some amazing writing friends to brainstorm, co-edit, and cheerlead each other's work. ]

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