Michael (Storky) Pomerantz, the endearingly nerdy hero of Storky: How I Lost My Nickname and Won the Girl (Putnam), first emerged over two decades ago in an assignment that D.L. (Debbie) Garfinkle wrote for a creative writing class. "We were given seven words that we had to use in a one-page story," recalls Garfinkle, who was taking the class at Pierce College "just for fun" while working a "really boring job at AT&T." She says her teacher loved her description of Storky and asked to keep it to use as a writing sample for other students. "I never got the piece back," she said.

Although she always had a passion for writing, composing "lots of bad poetry" and some short stories (one of which got published in 1984), Garfinkle, a California native, chose to follow a "practical" career path. After receiving an economics degree at Brandeis University, she went to law school at Berkeley, became an attorney, got married and had two children without ever seriously entertaining thoughts of becoming an author.

It wasn't until 1999 when doctors mistakenly thought Garfinkle had a rare form of breast cancer that she began to take stock of her life and made some dramatic changes. "The tumor turned out to be benign, but throughout the ordeal I was forced to ask myself some questions, [such as] 'What accomplishments am I most proud of?' I came up with the answer 'having my two children and writing a story that got published.' Soon afterwards, I decided to quit my job as a lawyer."

While at home with her two children and pregnant with her third, Garfinkle began the 14-month process of writing her first YA novel. She structured her book in journal form, recounting high-school freshman Storky's hilarious, often embarrassing mishaps as he pursued the girl of his dreams and came to terms with his neglectful father.

"I enjoyed writing from a male perspective. I like the feeling of creating a separate persona and inhabiting a certain character. It's a lot like acting," says Garfinkle, who was involved with drama in high school and college. The author also said that when writing Storky, she appreciated the fact that she did not have to think about her own teenage years. However, she admitted that her long-legged, Brillo-pad-haired protagonist does bear a striking resemblance to someone she once knew. "He was the nicest boy I ever dated in high school, and I dumped him for a juvenile delinquent," she says with a laugh, recognizing the irony. "In high school, I was a mix of the two teenage girls in the story, Gina [who chooses a football player nicknamed Hunk over Storky] and Sydney [the nicer, less popular girl, who turns out to be Storky's perfect match]."

After completing Storky in 2001, Garfinkle submitted it to Laura Rennert, whose name she found in a book of literary agents. After the book was accepted by Rennert came a series of disheartening rejections from publishers, which continued even after Storky won the San Diego Book Award for an unpublished piece of work. "When editors took time to make comments, I did take them to heart," Garfinkle admits. "I was constantly rewriting sections of the book up until the time it was bought by Penguin in August 2003. After that, my editor, John Rudolph, said the book needed only 'minor revisions,' but his idea and my idea of minor revisions are obviously different. I was surprised when he sent me a seven-page, single-spaced letter explaining changes that had to be made." The finished novel was well-received; PW's starred review called Garfinkle's narrator "memorable," saying that "readers will cheer him on, relishing the rewards that await him at the end of his first trying year of high school."

Clearly, Garfinkle, who did experience a good working relationship with Rudolph, has no regrets in leaving the world of law and entering the realm of children's literature. Now a fulltime mother and writer, she is busy working on two new books for teens. "I love being a writer," she says enthusiastically. "I write every day. Life wouldn't be complete without it!"