Robyn Ann McKenzie

**Robyn Ann McKenzie** is an American writer and author of the Ashby Chronicles.

## Life

Robyn Ann (nee Guest) McKenzie was born in Southern California. As a child, she enjoyed putting on plays for her family using She-Ra and Barbie dolls, drawing out scenes in stick-figure storyboards.

After years of struggling to read and attending remedial classes, she was diagnosed with dyslexia at age 9. With help from her teachers, she went from being sent away to study in a "special" reading group to being a straight-A student taking Honors English and being voted "Class Brain" three years in a row through middle school. She published her first poem when she was 11 and won local and state writing contests throughout school.

She attended Sonora High School in La Habra, California, and graduated with honors. She majored first in Music, but an injury to her jaw prevented her from playing trombone professionally. Having already taken many writing classes "for fun," she switched to an English major and graduated from Orange Coast College in 2004, a member of both Alpha Gamma Sigma and Phi Theta Kappa honor societies.

She married Matt McKenzie in 2005, and the following year they moved to Oregon, where they live now with their cat, Her Royal Purriness Queen Minerva of the Perch. (You may call her Minerva.)

## Works

Although she excelled in her studies and wrote many stories through high school and college, Robyn had no confidence in her writing due to dyslexia and one particularly nasty English professor. She held onto completed novels, convinced they "weren't good enough," and only allowed a few people to read them.

She first participated in NaNoWriMo in 2006, and in 2009 she was challenged to the "Double Nano," writing 100,000 words in 30 days rather than the normal 50,000 words. This resulted in what would later become both *Daughters of Ashby* and *Dodatrad Heiress*.

A few months after writing *Daughters of Ashby*, she began to post fanfiction online, the first time she allowed a large audience to read more than her poems and short stories. To her surprise, she grew immensely popular, with one of her fanfics receiving over 1.5 million views. When her fans urged her to publish something professionally, Robyn decided to send out *Daughters of Ashby*. It was rejected by literary agents for being "too long," and although she tried to split it in half, that only resulted in two novels that were both still deemed too lengthy for a first-time author.

Rather than fuss with traditional publishing, Robyn set about learning how to self-publish. This included chatting with authors she followed online who had also ditched publishing houses for independence, making her own book cover, and formatting both a paperback and ebook. On August 2016, she published *Daughters of Ashby* through CreateSpace (now KDP), and in 2020 she followed that up with *Dodatrad Heiress*.

She is currently working on a third book in the series.

## Links

* http://shadowstrider.net
* https://www.amazon.com/author/robynannmckenzie
* https://www.goodreads.com/robynannmckenzie
* https://www.facebook.com/RobynAnnMcKenzie
* https://twitter.com/writer\_robyn
* https://www.instagram.com/ra\_mck