Laurie Boris has always been fascinated with words. As a toddler, she scrawled them on her sheets with crayon. As a young child, she nabbed encyclopedia volumes off the shelves and taught herself how to read, shocking her mother at the dinner table by knowing that a kumquat was a member of the orange family. She wrote for her high school literary magazine and newspaper, and while she embarked on a career as a graphic designer after college, she still kept a daily journal and grabbed any opportunity to write on the job. On a break between assignments, Boris renewed her love for fiction, and wrote a bunch of horribly bad short stories. Eventually, she got better, got published, won a couple of awards, and started to write a novel on a dare from her husband, commercial illustrator Paul Blumstein. She showed him–she completed that one and wrote eight more.   Writing novels while working at a succession of full-time jobs in graphic design, advertising, and marketing was a challenge, in energy and time management, but it taught Boris an important lesson in priorities. “I really had to focus down to what was truly important,” she said. “I missed a lot of movies, can’t tell you what happened on the last episode of Lost, or any of them for that matter, but I got a lot of writing done.” A 2005 back injury caused her to reevaluate her career choices, and she became a freelance writer and editor, something she’d wanted to do for years. Growing a new business, finding clients and keeping them happy made preserving her fiction writing time that much more critical. “If I don’t schedule it like an appointment,” she said, “it doesn’t get done.”  She prefers to write contemporary fiction, and to use humor when it fits the characters and situation. “Imagine the little happy dance I was doing when Frankie [Goldberg, the protagonist of The Joke’s on Me] showed up—a stand-up comic.”  The Joke’s on Me, from 4RV Publishing, is her first published novel. She's published four more since then. When she’s not writing, Boris likes to cook, read, and watch baseball—not necessarily in that order, and in varying combinations. She is also a contributing author and associate editor for IndiesUnlimited.com.  

The Joke's on Me was a finalist in the 2012 Beach Books Festival. Drawing Breath was in the top 100 of 2012 for radio personality/publisher Cyrus Webb's Conversations Book Club.