Daniela K.A. Lee

One of my favorite parts about the holiday season is making Christmas cookies! Baking is just so much fun… and also a really good way to take a break from writing! I haven’t really been baking too much this season, though, because it just didn’t feel right to be celebrating the Christmas season without my family. This year has been my first Christmas season alone, and it hasn’t been all that festive. (Although I have been listening to Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas is You on repeat…) But today I decided to go ahead and bake anyway. Who says I can’t get into the holiday season by myself? And so I turned up the Christmas music and began to bake! I decided on sugar cookies, and found an online recipe that didn't look too complicated. Cutting out the shapes was really fun. At first the dough was really crumbly and I thought I had done something wrong, but after I let it chill in the refrigerator, it was all good! Turns out that crumbling dough was the leas

If you’re anything like me, you hate waiting. And yet patience is a HUGE part of being an author. I ought to know… I’m currently in the process of trying to find an agent for my newest book, which I am really, really excited for. It’s a big step from Son of the Sea Wolf, and I couldn’t be more thrilled about getting this out there. The problem is, I’ve hit a rut in my publishing endeavors. I’m no longer self-publishing; I’m trying to move on to getting published by a publishing agency, and I am in the current position of waiting to hear back from the people I have contacted. The waiting period is depressing, there’s no doubt about it. It really feels like you’re not living out your purpose; that you’re being passed over and rejected. I know I’ve been through times where I wonder if it’s really worth it to go on for one more day of waiting. And if I’m being honest, I still haven’t gotten past that. We authors really put ourselves through a lot by giving the world a part of ourselv

This is a picture of Cornell campus that I took today. And it's every bit as cold as it looks. "I would like to propose a toast to our first semester at Cornell University. Fellow students, we survived! We made it! We have laughed, cried, danced, and tried not to miss the bus to our eight-forty class.    We have journeyed through the stormy waters of our first round of prelims and relished the freedom of our first snow day. We have experienced new things such as taking a ballroom dancing class and learning the waltz, and we have experienced embarrassing things such as instantly forgetting every word of the lecture when the professor calls on us in class. We’ve learned how to walk across this vast campus to take in the beauty of the gorges, and we’ve learned how to   run  across this vast campus when we’re late for a class. But no matter what the first leg of our college journey may look like, we are all united by our determination, our inner strength, and our love for t