Hiya! I’m Raine.
When I was a little girl, I wanted to be an author. After falling in love with many books, I wanted to be able to give someone else that same experience. I fantasized about what it would be like to have people reading my words, to be important. The actual content of the books wasn’t at the top of my mind, but I knew that I loved these stories and wanted something to do with them.
But as I grew up, there was a lot of pressure to do something more practical. My family was very focused on the sciences, and the arts weren’t respected as valid pursuits in life. Important hobbies, to be certain, but not something that you consider your main thing. Eventually, I started to believe it myself. I was a sullen teenager for various reasons, and during that time I became more interested in physics and mathematics. In college, I pursued a degree in mathematics, and I greatly enjoyed it. Mathematics is beautiful, and pursuing knowledge is exhilarating, but I did not find it satisfying. My literature courses and creative writing extracurriculars did more to help me feel accomplished than my primary studies ever did. When the time came to start applying to graduate schools, my soul-searching led me to the now-obvious conclusion:
I didn’t want to go to graduate school. I wanted to write.
So I found a job with my mathematics degree and ended up living in a rural Midwestern town. Eventually, the stress of my office job got to be too much. Driving an hour into the city every day was bad enough, but my already fragile health couldn’t take the strain of the business or the people. So I ended up quitting just before being there a full year. Now I stay calm and rested in my quiet little countryside and write.