About Natalie
The PR Spiel
Natalie is a novelist, visual artist, and storyteller driven by a lifelong passion for creating meaningful, immersive worlds. Blending elements of fantasy and introspective fiction, her work explores resilience, identity, and the quiet strength found in overcoming adversity.
Having created art since early childhood, Natalie works across traditional and digital mediums, with a particular love for detailed illustration, photography, and handcrafted pieces like origami. Her creative journey is deeply personal—shaped by years of lived experience—and she channels that perspective into both her visual art and writing.
She is currently revising her debut novel, Archway, a project over a decade in the making, while also building a creative platform to share her work and connect with others through storytelling.
When she’s not writing, Natalie enjoys gaming, streaming, caring for animals, and finding inspiration in everyday moments.
This is where the fun begins… (the real story)
Life has certainly come with its share of trials and tribulations, and I know I'm nowhere near done growing. Then again, I don't think any of us ever truly are.
My story began with a fairly rocky start. At just 15 months old, doctors discovered a benign brain tumor pressing against my hypothalamus. While the tumor itself wasn't cancerous, anything growing inside a brain is generally considered bad news. My mother was faced with an impossible choice: allow me to undergo brain surgery with only a 5% chance of survival, or face the certainty that I would not live.
As any parent would, she chose hope.
After an 11-hour surgery and more anxiety than anyone should have to endure, I survived. A year later, fate decided I wasn't quite finished collecting medical records and I suffered a hemorrhagic stroke. The result was left-sided hemiparesis, a form of partial paralysis that still affects me today.
Growing up meant countless doctors' appointments, therapies, and medical evaluations. One memory has stayed with me for decades. I overheard a doctor tell a nurse that they were certain I would lose the ability to walk by my teenage years. As a child, that's a frightening thing to hear.
Well, to that doctor: I still have two functioning legs.
I've spent much of my life beating odds. While I have limited function in my left hand and live with chronic pain, I remain incredibly grateful for the opportunities I've had and the life I've been able to build. Had I been born a century or two earlier, there's a very real chance I wouldn't be here at all.
Perhaps that's part of why stories became so important to me.
As a kid, I devoured science and nonfiction books. Later, in my teens, I fell in love with fiction and the incredible worlds authors could create. I still remember watching a television show one day and thinking, I want to do that. I want to create characters people care about. I want to build worlds that live in someone's imagination long after they've finished reading.
That dream never left.
For more than fifteen years, I've been writing, revising, learning, and creating. I haven't published my first novel yet, but every year I move a little closer. My debut novel, Archway, is currently in development, and I'm determined to see it on a bookstore shelf someday.
And yes, I fully intend to publish it before George R. R. Martin finishes The Winds of Winter.
These days, I'm attending college online through Campus, pursuing my degree in IT while balancing creativity, chronic pain, and everyday life. When I'm not writing, you'll probably find me making art, taking photographs, folding origami, gaming one-handed, or spending time with my partner, Austin, and my Australian Shepherd mix, Estella.
I'm also hosting a Futurama podcast—a project I'm incredibly excited about. The only challenge is remembering that not every episode needs to be three hours long just because I can happily talk about Futurama for three hours. More details for that will be released very soon.
If you'd like to read a preview of Archway, you'll be able to find an excerpt before the end of June.