About Leigh

Storytelling

is in my blood.

It started with my father’s own elaborate tales. It started with my mother reading tales of princesses, hidden rooms, and magic. It started with daydreaming.

I spent much of my time as a child picturing myself in other worlds and in other lives. Most of the time, I was a damsel all alone in the world (the pasture behind my house). It also usually included me singing (very off-key) for someone to come rescue me from my drab existence. Yes, I was a dramatic child. Storytelling was in my blood, but I was too young to write it down.

Once I got older, and a bit less dramatic, I started writing. Places like Middle Earth, the Wizarding World, and Narnia inspired me to create something new. In those early days, most of my writing was fanfiction. It was terrible, honestly. I still loved it, though. It was a wonderful feeling to take characters I loved and place them in worlds of my own creation. It helped me learn to love writing and taught me invaluable lessons about story.

Soon, it was time to go off to college and join “the real world.” I knew I wanted to do something with writing, but really didn’t want to major in English. Most of those degrees ended with teaching or editing positions, but I wanted to write. Instead, I went into journalism. I graduated from Brigham Young University – Idaho in 2013 with a Bachelor of Science in Communications. From there, I started my short career as a News Producer for a local television station. I got to write every day (and even learned to love editing) but it left little time to write what I wanted: fiction and fantasy.

While working at the news station, I met Ley Esses. Together, we started a writing group which we called the Forge. That helped rekindle my efforts to writing my own stories. I started writing a lot of short stories, and even picked up a manuscript I had started years before.

The Forge eventually grew into AspenHouse Publishing, where I joined as an editor and cover designer. In that time, I was hired to edit Ley’s Chroma Series. Currently, Ley and I work as co-hosts for a podcast called Writing Roots. We share our knowledge and expertise about writing and publishing to help other new and self-published writers with a passion for storytelling.

In 2020, I found another group of writers online that helped give me that final push to finishing a manuscript. That story, a nerdy murder mystery about a professional gamer, released November 2020 as Toxic: Book One of the Gamer Files.