A. S. Lawson currently lives in Scotland. All the funny bits of previous third-person biographies lead to otherwise unsolicited attention from male "readers" (if that term can be employed in a suitably loose fashion), so you have only yourselves (and God, or failing that, random bystanders) to blame for their absence. She is currently "hard at work" (literary slang for "thinking about") writing her first novel, as well as waiting patiently to delete an imminent deluge of e-mails from male "readers" who wish to discuss "suitable looseness" in more detail, with pics plz.
Some of the events in my writing are ones that I've experienced firsthand - usually the depressing ones. Most of them I just made up, including ALL the illegal and immoral ones. An extended account of events in my life would be egomaniacal at this stage, so I'll try to keep this short and focus specifically on things relating to work.
I wrote when I was younger. I didn't do it so much that it started to become creepy like those weird kids on TV talent shows, I just did it because I liked it. The content was fairly dark and mature for my age - which is strange, since I spent my childhood running around in forests and thinking about unicorns. I thought about being a writer as a career choice (just like I thought about being a forest ranger and a nun), but at the time it was never a goal I worked seriously towards.
I stopped writing just before I went on an ill-advised odyssey of self-destruction that led me vaguely in the direction of studying medicine. On my way I passed through two colleges, one which I became very ill at and another which I barely managed to escape from before being buried forever beneath a pile of 'Free Mumia!' and 'Has THE MAN called you yet?' fliers.
I've tried not to remind myself that these were ordeals that I actually had to PAY for. The only upside presented by such stupidity was the fact that I decided I wanted to write again at some point during it, and set about doing so fairly often.
Naively, I found myself unable to measure my own progress on any scale not configured to two decimal places, and embarked on a quest to have short stories published in the field of genre fiction as many times as possible. The first piece (if you can call it that) I was ever paid for was only a few words long, and I received the amazing sum of ONE (1!) US dollar in return.
At the time I was just happy that someone gave me money for something which took absolutely zero effort on my part, and I fed my own ego by telling myself that I could probably hire, train and fund my own private army in one of Eastern Europe's poorer nations with that amount. I was tempted to try it, but I decided to keep it in my wallet, uncashed, instead. This turned out to be a good idea, because it indirectly allowed me to obtain permanent residence in a foreign country a couple of years later.
Before long I was fooling people into paying me significantly more than a dollar in exchanged for my work. It lasted quite a while, until a particularly outrageous (but hilarious) argument with an anthology editor (one who claimed that they rewrote all the stories that were sent to them to make them "sound better") finally prompted me to reevalutate what I was doing.
...all of which has brought me (and to a lesser but appreciated extent, YOU) to this point. I refer to the pieces of work on this site as short stories, although extended excerpts might be a more accurate description. I'm saving all the major events in various situations and characters' lives for pieces of writing larger than the ones found here, although there's still more than a hundred thousand words of writing on the site.
The stories I post here usually start and end fairly abruptly, but that's because they're just glimpses into the lives of the characters within. This allows me not only to write as much as I choose to with whichever character I want whenever I feel the urge, but it also lets me feel as if I'm not giving anything major away for free while still having more than enough content available for people to read, hopefully on a regular basis.