Author Bio

A real person with two fake names.

Hi!  I’m happy you’re here and it’s nice to meet you.  🙂

I write young adult fiction under the name R. A. Marshall.  My YA stuff is like this:  Kids go through some crazy things growing up.  Things that shape their personalities for the rest of their lives, even when they spend the rest of their lives trying to undo those changes.

But in my YA universe, the things that happen to kids are even more outrageous.  They find out they can shift into animals.  They find out they can start fires from thin air.  They find out they can control other people’s minds.  What do you do with that?  — especially if you’ve grown up assuming your life would be quiet and forgettable, living in a quiet, forgettable place.  Rural Arkansas.  A bad neighborhood in Oklahoma City.  Adolescence is hard enough without having to deal with superpowers.

Right now, R. A. Marshall is working on the third and final book in the Lost Children trilogy, called Smoke & Mirrors.

Anyway, that’s my YA sci-fi / fantasy stuff.

Then there’s Eliza Andrews, my second pen name.  I commandeered the name of a Civil War-era ancestor in this case, and Eliza writes only fiction with lesbian protagonists.  R. A. Marshall has gay and lesbian characters, including a lesbian protagonist in the Lost Children trilogy, but her books aren’t what you’d call “LGBT fiction” per se.  They’re more mainstream.  Eliza, on the other hand, she’s writing for a primarily LGBTQ audience.

Unlike R. A. Marshall, who’s already got five novels out, Eliza Andrews is new to the writing game.  She’s only published one book so far, a somewhat gritty, stand-alone contemporary lesbian romance that’s all about coping with grief and loss and how we do that in both healthy and unhealthy ways.

Right now, Eliza’s working on a post-zombie apocalypse story (!) that features two strong gay women who’ve had a hard-knock life.  It’s called Spring in the Land of the Dead, and it should be out around February or March (just in time for spring).