C.J. Galaway was born in a small town in Pennsylvania in the peak of the summer season. It wasn’t until three months later she would meet her family through adoption and become the youngest of three children. Though since her two older siblings are at least twenty years older, it was like being an only child.
C.J. grew up in a world of adults in a neighborhood with no children her age to play with, so her mother instilled in her a love of reading. She couldn’t imagine a time she wasn’t reading. “I grew up without computers, PS3 or XBOX, and cable T.V.,” she laughs. “So my favorite way to pass the time was to lose myself in a good book. I could easily read three to four a week.”
School was never that important to her, some studies came easy but for the most part it was boring for her. She was the quiet kid who sat in the back of your junior/senior high school classes doing anything but what the teacher wanted her to do. Although she would develop a passion for learning and return to college later in life to earn her bachelor’s degree from California University of Pennsylvania.
It was in junior high she started putting pen to paper and writing down what she imagined in her mind. An English teacher encouraged her to keep writing after enjoying a story she had written for extra credit over the holidays. “I had played with imaginary friends as a child and would lay out these elaborate scenarios in my mind for what would happen that day,” C.J. recalls. “It was easy to transfer that planning from my play time onto paper.”
