After reading Megan Miranda’s fast-paced thriller, “All the Missing Girls,” my friend Lisa and I went to see her at a Friends of the Library meeting in Kannapolis, just to ask some questions about the book told in reverse. We left with some of those questions answered and more.

When she told the audience she had a degree in biology from MIT, things started to make sense. She’s a brainiac, she has a logical and organized mind, THAT’s why she could tell it in reverse.

Miranda is also very energetic, and you can tell she needs things to occupy her mind.

She started writing young adult books inspired by weird science, because science, obviously, fascinates her.

Now a full time author, she previously worked in a cancer research lab, taught high school science, and she had two children, who are now 8 and 10.

When they were small, she put the children to bed at 6:45, in a room with blackout curtains, and then she’d write till 11. Now she writes while they’re at school, “but I don’t seem to be as productive. I guess the time limits helped.”

Megan came across as intelligent, funny and honest. She’s also very approachable and likes to talk to readers.

She explained how a book goes from idea to object, about how ideas sometimes are rejected, about how rewriting, revising and correcting is a big part of the process. She actually wrote “All the Missing Girls” before any of her young adult books were published. Then she took it back out and started revising. She and her editor went back and forth with suggested changes, new dialogue and characters who needed a boost.

It’s obvious she’s tenacious and determined, she expects to have an adult and a young adult book published next year.

Megan Miranda is someone to watch, for both adults and young adults.

Simms-Maddox book signing

M.J. Simms-Maddox will sign books and talk with readers at South Main Book Co., 110 S. Main St., on Friday, Sept. 2.

“Priscilla” is the prequel in the Priscilla Trilogy and the author’s debut as a fiction writer.

The trilogy chronicles the coming-of-age and the adventures of an African American young woman abducted from her comfort zone in the American Midwest to southern Africa — Zimbabwe and apartheid-ruled South Africa — and, back home again. The middle story and the sequel are forthcoming.