LeAnn Neal Reilly

About the Author

LeAnn Neal Reilly grew up near the Missouri River in that fertile land where corn, children, and daydreams take root and thrive. She spent countless hours reading and typing chapters on an old Smith-Corona in her closet, which luckily for her didn't have doors. Then she put away her daydreams and her stories and headed off, first to graduate magna cum laude from Missouri Western State University, and later to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh for a master's degree in professional writing. Along the way, she majored briefly in chemistry, served as opinion editor and then editor of her college newspaper, and interned for international design firm Fitch RichardsonSmith in Columbus, Ohio. The highlight of her internship came when she generated the product name Renata for a Copco teakettle (although designing the merchandising copy for ceramic tile adhesive and insulation packaging copy surely run a close second).

 

After graduate school, LeAnn first worked for a small multimedia startup and then a research group in the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. At the startup, she spent her time writing user manuals and scripts for software to train CSX railroad engineers. While working among geeks, LeAnn became enamored and decided to take one home for herself. After getting married and starting a family, she returned to her adolescent daydreams of writing novels. Never one to shirk from lofty goals, she added home schooling her three children as her day job.

 

After years of working in an office not much better than an unfinished closet, LeAnn has finished THE MERMAID'S PENDANT. She is currently working on her next novel, tentatively titled WEEBLES WOBBLE. LeAnn joined GoodReads three years ago where she writes reviews regularly. 

 

LeAnn lives outside Boston with one husband, three children, a dog named Hobbes (after Calvin &), and a cat named Attila.

10 Random Things About LeAnn

  1. She wrote an opinion column for her college newspaper emulating the style of Pulitzer-winning Chicago columnist Mike Royko. Her fictional alter ego drank outrageous coffee drinks instead of hanging out in a bar conversing with Slats Grobnik.
  2. She eats dark chocolate every day with a cup of tea or coffee.
  3. She beat a CS professor, a CS staff programmer, and two or three CS grad students at the logic game SET. She quit while ahead.
  4. Her first query letter for an illustrated fairytale was sent when she was eight by her big brother. As she recalls, it was about a princess enchanted as a flower who waited for a prince to rescue her. Needless to say, that's when LeAnn got her first rejection.
  5. She home schools three children, which explains why she's a bit dazed most of the time.
  6. Her secret reading vice is romance novels. She loves YA novels, classics, and historical fiction. She is also reading her way through history to make up for her poor education.
  7. Her biggest fear: public speaking. No, imagining everyone in their underwear does NOT help.
  8. She's waited tables, something she thinks EVERYONE should do.
  9. Biggest peeve: unflushed toilets. Biggest perpetrators of this heinous crime: her kids.
  10. Her favorite authors: Shakespeare and Jane Austen. If she had only three books to take with her on a desert island, her copy of Shakespeare's complete works and a collection of Austen's novels would make the cut.