I was born in Miami, Florida: a place that looked nothing like that 1980s cop show. We didn't wear pastel suits or hula shirts (though I often wore shoes without socks). I never met a flamingo and palm trees made me sneeze.

As a kid, I climbed the oak trees in my backyard near the bay and imagined that their branches were the scaly skins of flying dragons. I was the last of five kids (boy, girl, boy, girl, girl) and raised like an only child. I spent a lot of time talking to invisible creatures. I tried to warn my mom and dad about the tentacles lurking in the deep end of the swimming pool (which me and Luke Skywalker, along with a gang of space pirates, would slash with our lightsabers). The hall closet was a time machine that could zap back to the days of brontos and T-rex. In fact, my playmates were raccoons and foxes, opossums and burrowing owls, bats and land crabs that scuttled up into the trees with me.

Because my family was from New England, I talked funny, like Haley Mills in The Parent Trap: "I shan't tell my aunt about the ants." Our house, unlike the Spanish-style McMansions of Dade County, was a wooden cottage (moved on a truck from the jungles of Coconut Grove) with a wraparound deck, a fireplace and an attic. At night, I'd fall asleep to whippoorwills and Santeria drums. During Hurricane Andrew, we rode out the winds, crouched under a table in the hallway with our Siamese cat, soaked with salty rain, our bare hands pressed against the bedroom doors. The next morning, the windows were gone but the roof was still standing. And so were we.

In high school, my city started taking cues from those neon-soaked television shows. The beach--no longer thronged with old people and seagulls--began to build swanky cafes and velvet-roped clubs. The same presto change-o trick turned the downtown warehouses into million dollar condos with minimal, one-word names reminiscent of martinis. Miami was no longer a home for wharf rats. It was the treeless land of cinderblock malls and sun-baked parking lots, where the kids of suburban Kendall roamed in aimless circles, driving candy-flossed Hondas throbbing with bass.

I watched from a distance. I put it down on paper, as I'd done since I could pick up a Crayola (starting with hand-stapled "horse books" on notepaper, which forced my unfortunate readers to turn pages backward, like reading Chinese). I studied fiction of all forms in college: from black-and-white monster movies to ultra-serious plays by people with unpronounceable names. I wasn't interested in penning novels about middle-aged housewives who bake cakes. I became known as the chick-who-writes-about-teenagers. It took me a while to figure this out. Teachers said: write what you know. I wrote about elves and other dimensions. They said: write something that you'd actually want to read. I wrote feature-length screenplays about Florida girls who didn't want to grow up.

I grew up anyway. I stayed in school so long, they gave me a bunch of degrees. Now I get paid to spend my days talking about the things we both love: video games and comic books. I'm still writing about dark-hearted teens in schizophrenic cities. After trying to complete a sprawling collection of interconnected short stories, I realized that they fit better as a book. Thankfully, a few other people...like my amazing agent and editor...had the same idea.

When I'm not daydreaming in front of a glowing laptop, I like to doodle on paper napkins, explore abandoned buildings, take pictures, ride horses, and cook green curries. I collect Asian candy, pinback buttons, tote bags and mix tapes. In kindergarten, I started recording conversations on an old Panasonic cassette player and trading them with my cousin in Gill, Massachusetts. Today we have enough to fill six brown paper grocery bags. I still haven't listened to all of them.

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Crissa-Jean Chappell holds an MFA in screenwriting and an interdisciplinary PhD in film theory, philosophy, and literature. She teaches creative writing and cinema studies at Miami International University of Art and Design. Her short stories have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Confrontation and the Southwest Review. Her debut YA novel, Total Constant Order, was published by HarperCollins. It is a Florida Book Award medalist, a VOYA "Perfect Ten," and a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age.

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