SHORT BIO: DeAnna Knippling is an eclectic bookworm who writes across genres but always with plot twists to die for! Her hobbies are cooking, taking long walks on Florida beaches, fangirling, digging into AI, open-source intelligence, history, biology, and psychology—while her tea goes cold. You can find her at WonderlandPress.com.
REAL-LIFE THRILLER MOMENT: I've been stalked numerous times since I was an early teenager, at least once a year. (I didn't even get to take a year off for Covid!) The latest one was in the Ybor City area of Tampa. I'd take walks regularly in the mornings to avoid the heat, and a white pickup truck with junk in the back would follow me around. I spotted the truck at a house nearby, with the yard full of trash and engineless cars on blocks. I changed my route often, but whenever the guy saw me, he'd follow me around and I'd have to play games to get rid of him before I went home. A friend was coaching me on how to handle catcallers—imagine you're protecting a vulnerable child, not your adult self—and I finally just used it on the driver of the truck. I stopped waiting for him to pass me, and gave him a mama bear look. I didn't get followed again, and we moved after that (as planned). And that was that.
Except that later I found out the guy was infamous in the neighborhood for assaulting and raping women, and had just gotten out of jail. HOOH.
WHO I ADMIRE: I admire quiet heroism the most. The people most likely to be heroes in my eyes are often the ones who will NOT talk about it and often have zero clue that anyone would think of them as heroes. Fortunately I'm a good listener and can often pull people's stories out of them without them realizing how much I admire them for what they've done. I know a lot of people who have had to make hard choices between bad and worse, who have had to navigate situations they're not proud of in order to keep other people from suffering, and who have survived all kinds of horror in order to get to a point where they can drag their broken bodies out of bed, smile, and work their asses off to make other people's lives a little better. I know a lot of survivors with secrets, and I'm proud of them.
Of course they're all over my stories. But I'll never tell :)
FAVORITE MEDIA MOMENT: The video game HADES was my favorite piece of creative media from last year. (The game is from 2020 but I only just finished it in 2023.) Wow! The structure of the game revolves around the main character, Zagreus, trying to escape the underworld...but failing. Repeatedly. Every time you fail, though, you practice valuable skills and gain experience.
My favorite high-stakes moment in the game was the first time I ran into the end boss. And...I won.
Then I realized that it didn't end the game and I'd have to do it again.
And again.
And again.
By the time I actually finished the game, I had a totally different attitude about facing game challenges, experimenting with tactics that I wasn't comfortable with, and overall just shrugging off failures. I'll see you next time...
The moment when I thought I'd won and I'd really just only started the game, though. I'm still laughing about it.
WHAT I’M WORKING ON: I have a new novel coming out, The Witch House, in February. Preorders are here: https://books2read.com/the-witch-house
This is a middle-grade horror novel about witches and found family, and, as always when I write horror, I managed to horrify myself several times as I was writing. It's meant for 9-13 year olds, but so is Coraline. This is the same madhouse of a story, cute until it gets dark.