Danielle N. Gales grew up in Merseyside, but now calls Sunny Hastings home. She isn’t quite sure where that “sunny” part came from, as Hastings seems to experience on average 0.75 days of sunshine per year, but everyone always says it, so she’s cool to go with the flow. After attending and dropping out of college four times, she finally decided that academics weren’t her thing. And then promptly collected an Upper Second Class Honours Degree in Humanities with Classical Studies, which has thus far proven unhelpful in obtaining a decent job.

She has spent most of her working life pushing paper around in bureaucratic nightmare scenarios that could best be described as Orwellian, or perhaps Kafkaesque. Probably both. If you’re wondering why that government department is taking so long to deal with your issue despite the fact that you’ve written twice and phoned three times, know that it is because the Memory Hole is a real thing, and you’d best abandon all hope.

She’s been writing all of her life, mainly in speculative genres — fantasy and science fiction, but preferring fantasy with a touch of the bittersweet. She is a terminal insomniac. If you’re talking to her, you’re either in another time zone, or you’re a terminal insomniac too (in which case, she welcomes you to the Dark Side. She’s compiled a list of 273 different synonyms for “dark”, but is always eager to collect more). Once upon a time she spent far too much of the day playing video games (back before the first thought upon waking and last thought before sleeping became Why aren’t you writing?). She occasionally still does. She keeps pet rats, but has not yet perfected the art of controlling them with her mind. Alas.

As a writer, she naturally drinks far too much coffee, which probably explains the insomnia thing. But if it’s a choice between sleep or coffee, she knows which one she’d rather lose.