How my husband and I finally learned to see eye-to-eye on finances — My husband Marius and I are similar in many ways—we both work in the media industry, love to sleep in, and are adventurous world-travellers. But we’re very different in many ways, too. Marius is an amazing cook, I could burn water. Getting married meant a lot to me, but not…

Choosing whether to have children — My top article on Medium is ‘5 Books to Read if You’re Unsure About Having Kids’. There’s an appetite for this kind of content. More and more people are asking themselves the all-important question: “do I want to have children?” People are looking for answers, guidance, and shared experience—and where…

Learn from other people’s experiences when making the most important decision of your life — Deciding whether to have kids is one of the biggest decisions you’ll make in life. Unfortunately, it’s also a decision that everyone feels entitled to weigh in on. It was only six years ago in 2015 when Pope Francis famously said, “The choice to not have children is selfish.” (Pope…

Choosing evocative names, limiting the number of character perspectives, and other unexpected lessons I learned while writing my first YA book — Writing fantasy is tough, but writing Young Adult (YA) fantasy is even tougher. You want your world to be dynamic, interesting, fully-realized — but have very little time to do so. Writers are discouraged from spending too long writing location or character descriptions, lest they risk losing readers. …