Brief Author Bio:

My first memory that I can recall as a writer was in kindergarten. We were given an assignment to write a story! The class was given standard sized copy paper to write on and illustrate with crayons. The works were then taken, laminated, and bound in a small plastic spiral and returned to us: our first published work! I remember my teacher asking me, more like pressuring me it felt, if I would draw more pictures. I had some pages with just words, no drawings. No! My novel was perfect, thank you very much! It was an approximately five page mystery novel about just what exactly that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow contains. And, apparently, it contains a stolen bracelet. The two young detectives then go on an awesome journey to track down the rightful owner! At any rate, that was when I became a writer. I wish I still had that little book, but it seems it was lost in the many moves I made over my adult years. I do not remember much else about writing again until I was ten and took up poetry writing for about the next six years. I wrote them all down in a leather bound journal that I still have to this day. I was actually published in the 2005-2006 Teen Ink Winter Poetry Journal with my poem entitled Juggle. I think I was about sixteen when I began writing novels. I kept them in spiral bound notebooks in my room. Painstakingly handwritten. About a year later I decided to throw those pieces of crap away, but a third novel from that era survived. It was saved on the computer and I forgot all about it until I was about eighteen. It is approximately 35k words, and very poorly written, but I am determined to one day salvage that novel from my early years of novel writing, though I never have intentions of publishing that novel that I titled The Art of Growing Up. I was seventeen when I graduated home high school and moved from Texas to Nebraska. It was then, in 2006, when I was living with my cousin that we participated in NaNoWriMo for the first time and I wrote my first full fledged novel entitled She Learned To Smile. I have no intentions of ever publishing this work, because it is essentially an over dramatization of my growing up years, it is very open and honest, and not something I am prepared to let all of the free world have dibs on. The next novel came with NaNoWriMo 2007 which I gave the working title of A Memory In The Snow and I cannot wait to get this edited and published, I would even like to write a sequel for this one day. The next year, 2008, I wrote Shades of Grey, but due to some complications in my personal life that I could not handle alongside a NaNoWriMo challenge, I gave up at 43k words, though I am determined to one day finish and hopefully publish this novel. (Word of advice: Do not move across the state, go through the process of a divorce, and reunite with an old college flame all in the month of November.) Life can be messy, but we move on. It was in this year, 2009, that I decided: I am a writer! Yes, I knew that, but you know what? I am a writer! So, when I returned to college once again after moving back home to Texas, I entered as an English major. This year my novel is a comedy entitled The Guardian, and I would love to one day see it in print. My name is Ellie Branstiter, but, once published, you can expect to see me published under Ellie Commons, because, that college flame I mentioned, turned out to be my soul mate, the one who pulled me back up after I got the divorce behind me. He is the one that showed me what a true, loving relationship is. He is also the first person that told me I have what it takes to be an author, to make works of art with words. And that is what I intend to do.