About

In December of 2010, just into her nineteenth year, Blackbird McKinsey self-published her first book. It was a story about stories, creative energy, and the value of imagination. As a culmination of her many years of learning and plotting that began in the single digit ages, she was encouraged by a home schooling family liberal with reading time and with a vocational philosophy to do what you do best.

Having decided on a profession as an author at eleven years old, she was given a home-based education with emphasis in English and Literature, as well as in writing form and studying other stories on her own. The Storytellers: Anterria, book one of the growing series, was eight years in the making, in addition to the several other plot lines of the remaining sequels. In her own words, “I am what I wanted to be when I ‘grew up.’ It’s one of the best, and the hardest, things I’ve done, and I can’t think of doing anything else at this point.”

As The Storytellers evolved, there were several other projects that still sit on her bookshelves in the shape of stacks of drafts and notes. One such project, Blackbird, is where she takes her name from. Derived partly from the Beatles song of the same name, but mostly due to her darker tastes and love of birds, it’s the name used by several friends and appears in many other forms, professionally and in published works.

In the beginning of 2012, the second installment of The Storytellers was published, as well as the book Sydney West, a departure from the multicolored, cosmic fantasy. As her style has developed into expressions of bookish, dialogue propelled drama, gothic overtones and passive satire flavor the newer mystery series, continuing with the sequel, Lorem Ipsum, published at the end of that same year.

She commonly lists her greatest creative influences as Ray Bradbury, Lemony Snicket and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as script writers Steven Moffat, Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman and artists of other media such as Edward Gorey, Adam Young, Steam Powered Giraffe and Vladlena Sevelova. Aside from writing, she enjoys live music, used books, tea and knitting, in addition to a fair amount of natural counterculture.

I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, nor how lowly the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you.

– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle –