Stella Pike's life has always been pretty dull, as life in a small town can be. She's been going steady with her high school sweetheart for years and has even landed herself a steady job at the gas station just down the road from her parents' home. Everything is normal, verging on desperately dull, until one night... Earlier in the day, there'd been a short thunder snowstorm. Stella had seen part of the lightning show as she'd driven in for her shift. Now there was just light, fluffy snow falling in delicate, individual flakes. In the light from the street lamps that were just humming into life, the snow looked like gently falling glitter. For a moment, the clerk stood by the windows that completely made up one of the walls of the store, staring out into the night. Something hit the side door and made her jump, a muted shriek escaping her lips.
About the Author: My name is Emmaline Westlund and I've lived in Minnesota my entire life (except for three months spent in Santa Barbara, CA). I'm a cat lover and a former retail slave. I slung gasoline and cigarettes at people for five years while I wrote my first 20 (published) stories and I can safely say that I NEVER want to do that again. In fact, if I can avoid any real deal-with-the-general-public jobs in the future, I will. I am very definitely not cut out for retail. I've been writing since I was seven years old, when I wrote what was arguably the only novel I've ever written. It was called "And Jessie, Too" because the title fit? I don't even remember what my justification was for giving it that title, but what I do remember is the heap of trouble I got in with the school when one of my teachers discovered the notebook that the first half of the story was scribbled in. You see, AJT was about a seven year old sociopathic serial killer that was going around and killing students at Hayes Elementary. I named names. It wasn't so much because I hated my classmates- at that point, I'd been given no reason to- as it was that I'd not developed my writing enough quite yet to be able to come up with new and interesting character names. Hell, Jessie even killed Emma Westlund, I mean, come on. I obviously wasn't planning to kill my classmates. I'd simply begun reading Fear Street. I was a very prolific writer from age 7 to about age 13, when I stopped really trying and instead focused on video games and Sailor Moon. I didn't really create anything original until I was 16 and began keeping a travel diary during a road trip with my mom. We went to Vegas, by way of South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, and finally Nevada. After that trip I began toying with an idea that eventually became Paper Dolls. My mom had put the idea of "real" anime characters walking around. With massively disproportionate eyes and mouths that could do things that aren't found in nature. The original draft was 25 pages of 9 point font before I dropped the project because I grew bored of it. When I was 21 I started reading books again and I started work on Paper Dolls. On May 31st of 2011 I went to a Caribou Coffee and uploaded Paper Dolls to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing.