Heidi Wessman Kneale is an Australian author of moderate repute. She lives in Western Australia, near the Indian Ocean. Like most humans, she’s got a family. She also associates with the World’s Most Boring Cat and with a mango terror of a foster fail from Cat Haven.
She has always enjoyed fiction. She developed the precocious and consuming habit of reading from a rather early age, devouring every book in her path. This habit also nurtured her love of writing stories.
She wrote her first novel at age ten, a terrible and necessary thing. It may never see the light of day, unless the world needs it. She was first published at age seventeen–a fantasy poem in a Literary magazine. She’s written all kinds of things, from poetry to novels to screenplays and even wrote an opera once, music and all.
But now, her heart belongs to novels (and Richard Armitage).
She’s got a BA in Film and Music from the University of Utah and a MSc in Conceptual Astronomy from Swinburne University. (You can see how these three fields are closely related.) She’s currently wooing various universities to take her on for her PhD.
As part of her BA, she took many writing classes. Despite their snobbish attitudes and rampant abuse, her fellow students failed to scare her off; she still wanted to write. One professor, Dr Anne Wingate, herself a published author, cheerfully enabled her writing habit. (You enabler. I love you.) It was actually the Film History courses that nurtured her more as an author, plus other Film Theory classes, that best taught her structure, flow, pacing and all those other behind-the-scenes skills that make for really great books. Really, studying Film prepared her better than any Creative Writing course to be an author. She mostly recommends it.
She joined the Online Writing Workshop (Formerly the Del Rey Online Writing Workshop) the first year of its inception, spending nearly two decades as a productive member. She served her journeymanship there, and can’t recommend it highly enough. Currently she is an Established member of Romance Writers of Australia, where she often teaches RWA Academy courses and occasionally presents workshops.
Her BA also provided her with a strong background in sound engineering and recording. She’s taken these skills and applied them to creating audiobooks. As a narrator and producer, she specialises in helping those with an interest in “Narrated by the Author” projects. Please contact her if you’d like more info.
She’s had several short stories and non-fiction articles and lots of random stuff published over the years, but now, she focuses on novels and novellas, pretty little things that they are.
Ignore the fact she has a full-time Day Job; she does her best to ignore it as well. But hey, sometimes one must be one’s own patron.
She adores NaNoWriMo, and has participated pretty much since the second or third year it ran. Usually she wins. Feel free to buddy up if you also participate.
She’ll occasionally dish out solicited advice, but only if she has time. She is flattered you did ask.
(Mostly, she’s wondering how often this bio will be repeated in various locations about the Internet.)