“He’s so normal. How can anything be wrong?”

Kim Segal, the main character in Aaron and Me, is faced with one of the most horrendous experiences a parent can endure during a baby wellness checkup. A clinical observation shows a couple of innocent café au lait birthmarks which could indicate a possible diagnosis of Neurofibromatosis for her 18-month old son, AARON. Kim feels ill equipped to cope with the indefinite nature of the diagnosis, and begins to spiral out of control.

Author Biography: Debralynn Fein has been writing professionally since 2002. Her articles and stories have appeared in Wee One’s Magazine, and Hackwriters.Com, run from Falmouth College of Arts. She also published a short story in the Greenwich Village Literary Review, entitled Family Pictures and articles in Early Childhood Examiner. She attended Stony Brook University in 1978 and 1979 with a major in English Literature, and also earned a Master’s Degree in Elementary Education from Queens College, City University of New York, in 1987. She has a fresh voice readers will enjoy.

The sense of place Debralynn writes about are from the New York metropolitan area, since that is where she is most familiar. She’s read her work before audiences at the New York Public Library and Montclair Library and all stories have been well received.
On a personal note, she has been happily married for the past 38 years, and has two grown sons. She had been a Kindergarten teacher for many years, and more recently teaches English as a Second Language to adults. For hobbies, she likes to do needlepoint and knit. Reading is a big focus as well.
Like most children, she learned to read around age six. She became an avid reader in elementary school, and that’s continued throughout her life. In the fifth or sixth grade, Debralynn began writing poetry—awful as it was. Through her seventh grade English teacher, Mrs. Beatrice Moskowitz, she gained an appreciation for better literature. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, and Dibs in Search of Self by Virginia Axline, were among her favorites. Deb’s friends were her first reviewers.

Debralynn’s own creative process begins with a story rattling around in her head. Once she organizes her ideas and melds them together, creating a first draft is easy. She presents the ideas to her writers’ critique group, listens closely, accepts comments she believes will strengthen her vision, and craft a second, third or fourth draft.
She prefers to write in the first person because it lends itself to immediacy and is easier to draw in the reader. Writing fiction is her preference, calling the genre in which she writes, realistic fiction. She creates situations that could happen to anyone, and are more believable because of that. The characters must be credible–not just the main characters but everyone in the book. Important elements are the personal difficulties encountered by the characters, a climax and, hopefully, a successful resolution.
Her writing is self-therapeutic: she is able to get certain thoughts and feelings out into the open. She has always liked writing, witnessing her many journal books over the years. The biggest item on her bucket list is to see her novels published. Fulfilling her dream includes sharing lessons learned with parents, teachers, and children.