Kate Lowell was the only seven-year-old in her neighborhood with her own chemistry set. True to form, she immediately ignored all the carefully designed and completely safe experiments that came with it to focus on blowing things up. After the destruction of a mattress and a bedside table in a freak accident of combustion (and the subsequent confiscation of her chemistry set), she changed her focus to other high-adrenaline pursuits. She has wrestled injured Dobermans, rescued abused horses, taught First Aid, and worked on a number of dairy farms, all of which seemed to involve being kicked, bitten, punched or spit on. (Yes, even the First Aid.) Her favorite job was working as a paramedic, which she'd still be doing if not for being injured on the job. She's currently married to an organic farmer, mostly because Angus calves are really cute. Nowadays, she likes to create worlds and throw people in them to see how they get along, usually while laughing evilly. Her tastes in books and writing are eclectic; she reads everything (with the possible exception of western) and she writes whatever looks fun. The challenge of creating a world that hangs together logically in the mind of the reader, and characters that the reader cares about and wants to know better, is easily as thrilling as any of the in-person risks she's taken in her life. And if things get dull, well...she can always blow something up.