I’ve always been a daydreamer. As a kid I wasn’t that interested in other children, I wanted to be left alone with my mind and let it tell me stories. Distant worlds and time travel were frequently reoccurring topics. I was usually the hero, with the occasional side-kick. Writing came naturally to me, as a way to try to catch the stories, and later on, to share those with the friends I did manage to get, despite being somewhat strange.

Adulthood didn’t stop the daydreaming, but it made me use less of it in my writing. Instead I wrote poetry and more conventional stories. Boring stories.

When I was pregnant with my second child I’d enough of them. I’d self-published one novel; a neat piece of relationship drama where nothing happened. I loved the characters but the plot was too slow. Writing, publishing and marketing were hard work, and if I was going to do it again it would not be with a boring story.

My brain rescued me by playing me a scene I’d first come up with as a teen. I knew that the street depicted was from the future, and that the boy getting beat up was on a quest to save his sister. I also had the idea that the girl saving him (who had been me in the original story, of course) was part of a resistance movement.

I ran with that, started writing and discovered the kind of writer’s high I hadn’t experienced since I was a kid. As I finished that first book (Article Three) more ideas kept entering my daydreams. Not just about the two other parts of what would be The System trilogy, but ideas that could be turned into short stories and new novels. My mind is as creative now that it has ever been, which is no small blessing for a mum of small children.

The wonderful thing about sci-fi and fantasy is that you don’t have to be tied down by norms and rules of the ordinary world.  You’re still able to address modern day issues, though. I try to use this in my writing by exploring themes that make the reader question his or her own views as well as society’s. I use characters that are not often depicted in main-stream literature. People I find interesting, who stretch our notion about what parts people usually play in literature. In my writing there’re no alpha-dogs and no damsels in distress. I’ve even declared my books love-triangle free. It sounds like a joke, but I want other things for my readers than the question about which hot guy the main character is going to choose at the end.

I’m an indie-publisher, which is equal parts funny and exhausting, and I have four novels published in Swedish. The idea to get my novels translated professionally and try to reach a larger audience is more than a little crazy, but as I started discussing it with fellow writers I couldn’t quite shake it. As I grow older I get increasingly less afraid, and also crazier, and I feel like I would be stupid not to follow my dreams when I have the chance.