About Me

 

Hey there! Monica Prelooker over here, nice to meet you.

 The picture is old, from 2008. I picked it because it doesn't matter how I look, but where I am. San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentinean Patagonia. The place I love. The place that welcomed me a lifetime ago and allowed me to grow both as a person and as a writer.

It doesn't matter if I'm locked up in my house at dawn, sitting at the computer, drinking gallons of mate and smoking like a frigging chimney. Ever since I moved to Bariloche in 1994, I'm always like I'm in that picture: absorbing the gorgeous surroundings, letting them cleanse me anew.

I was born back in 1970 in the province of Buenos Aires, to a family of writers and bookworms. Reading and writing were always regular, everyday things to me, like eating or sleeping.

Before I was born, my parents used to have a sailing boat, and both of them felt a deep, unconditional love for the sea they passed on to me since I was a little girl.

My mother's love for literature and the sea made her read to me some unusual bedtime stories. That's how I got to know Emilio Salgari's reknown sagas, Sandokan and the Black Corsair.

She didn't know it, but she was passing on to me not only her two passions, but also an itch that would never leave me: writing.

I tried my first literary steps when I was about ten, curious to figure how would I fit into those stories I liked so much. And I found the fascination and the satisfaction that blank pages had in store for me, just waiting for me to unload whatever my imagination came up with on them.

I never stopped writing.

I explored genres and formats, settings and voices.

To me, writing is still like eating or sleeping. If I don't do it, I feel like a pit in my belly that end up turning into a physical discomfort. Once a story nests in my head, I have no choice but tell it.

Making music used to be my other pursue. But I write stories a lot better than songs, so I gave room to my music passion through stories about musicians.

I first published my stories online about ten years ago, in personal blogs. 

Meanwhile, I got married, had my son Manuel, moved to Mexico for 3 years, came back to Bariloche, moved to Buenos Aires for 3 years, came back to Bariloche. Yeah, I know, right?

My son and I back in 2010, before moving to Buenos Aires

In time, social platforms grew enough to include a few for reading and writing. 

That's how I landed on Wattpad. For those of you who don't know it, it has over a hundred million users worldwide.

Once a year, the platform opens their official writing contest, the Wattys, which draw literally hundreds of thousands of stories of all kinds.

I won them twice, in 2018 and 2019, with stories in Spanish that won the Break Through and the Historical Fiction categories.

That gave me the last push I needed to start publishing on Amazon, in ebook and paperback. However, previous versions of my stories are still available online to read for free, on Wattpad and Booknet.

To all of you who give my stories a try, I can only wish you that you enjoy them half of what I enjoyed writing them. That would be already a whole lot.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading this, and my stories. Your time and attention is the best, most important gift you can make to a writer. The chance to reach you, hook you, cause you emotions or reactions, is a privilege that fills me with gratitude.

Monica Prelooker