VJ (Victoria) Hamilton was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, and grew up on an isolated grain farm in the middle of the prairie. Thus she and her siblings spent an inordinate amount of time acting out the lives of others a.k.a. playing with dolls and dressing up in Mom’s clothes. She has thrilling memories of watching animals being born and storms descending from miles away. Yay, snow days.
The first year of high school she wore all the wrong clothes and carried, blush, an attaché case. She was a bully magnet. By second year she wised up, found some dear and true friends, of both the human and hard-cover type.
One fateful day in chemistry class she fell in love with the question: “what is color?” and took a multi-year detour to the amazing world of chemistry… but, still, she smuggled New Yorkers into her lab-book for those hours when the experiments dragged.
To pay for the university, she worked on an assembly line sewing jeans and later, worked as a cook’s helper, and also as Odd-job Annie.
After completing two science degrees, she worked at one dot-com company until it was sold, at a second dot-com until the dot-com bubble burst. She worked in finance until the financial crisis blew up. Ever heard the saying, “May you live in interesting times”?
All along, she had been writing, writing. Essays, lab reports, software manuals, financial analyses… and some “thoughts.”
All stories she sent out were rejected. Except one. The next year, the same thing. And so on. Each time a story was accepted she rejoiced. She tried to understand why one story was good and all the rest were… elephant dung. It became the new “what is color?”
Every once in a while, a story would lodge itself in her brain and send out tentacles whose squirming would wake her up at odd hours of the night. Thus began the novels.