About

About the girl:

Samantha Yellin is a college graduate of SUNY Purchase's Creative Writing program - a crash course in insomnia, Starbucks, tears and sometimes writing.

She fills her non-writing time with taking naps, baking, playing video games and sometimes actually picking up a book. She's a comics girl, but not a superhero fan.

Her favorite foods are full of spices, her favorite drinks warm her tummy, and her favorite books leave her aching for some kind of adventure - maybe to save the world, or maybe just to fall in love.

Her blog is a place to vent about her projects, about her troubles with writing and life and cooking. But it's also a place for her to celebrate the small things she finds, the life she's learning to enjoy more and more, and the people who have gotten her there.

She writes YA Fantasy on her good days, and blog posts on her bad ones.

About the story:

Halfer started out as a dinky little project in middle school, the product of too many anime and manga, and of a half-baked idea of what love was and a worldview formed entirely out of books and movies.

Now that she's 23, the story has evolved into something more - the tale of Rena, a downtrodden Jersey girl desperate to find some way to fit into her own life before she loses everything she knows. What she didn't see coming was the tree root that got in the way of her foot, and sending her quite literally falling into another world. 

Stuck in Fyorea, a world developed over the better part of a decade between the writer and her best friend, Rena learns that nothing she knew was exactly how she thought it was - a shapeshifter as a best friend, an elf as a guardian, and secrets surfacing about her own existence that she never thought possible. With everything changing and danger looming on the horizon, Rena learns that even surrounded by friends, her greatest ally might still be herself. If only she had the confidence to truly believe it.