About Me — Tess / Teresa / Tessa

I have lived many lives in many places.
Korea, Indonesia, London, Scotland, and across Aotearoa; from Northland to Marlborough, Canterbury, and now the West Coast. My story has never followed a straight line. It has been messy, raw, and full of reinventions. I’ve worked strange jobs, survived difficult years, and learned the world from the outside before I ever understood how to stand inside it.

Through everything; the chaos, the moving, the rebuilding, writing has always been the one constant. When I didn’t belong anywhere, I belonged in stories. When life was too sharp, too loud, or too much to carry, I wrote characters who held the weight with me.

I didn’t follow the usual path into publishing. I wasn’t the golden student or the tidy success story. For a long time, I was simply someone who kept writing because being creative was a light. Over the years I filled notebooks, lost manuscripts, started again, and again, and again. Each restart taught me something about the kind of writer I wanted to be- someone unafraid of grit, emotion, or the shadows inside a character.

In 2019, I returned to study and completed a Master of Writing, where I rediscovered not only craft but confidence. From that came my first full sci-fi novel, Crossing the Divide, and soon after, the world of Fire Breathes Stone and Storm, a romantasy born from the stubborn belief that stories can come from broken places and still be beautiful.

I write fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction because these genres let me explore the questions that shaped my life:
Where do we belong?
Who do we become after surviving ourselves?
And what worlds do we build when the real one fails us?

I’m a writer shaped by a winding road and this winding road has a way of making stories worth telling.