Stephanie Baumgartner Email & Phone Number

Christ-follower, wife, mother, author, dreamer, INFJ, Hufflepuff, WWII enthusiast. My dream pet would be a red fox and if I could eat only one food for the rest of my life, it would be avocados.Wow. A house made of avocado and a yard full of foxes. I think that would be my heaven.

• Author

  Self-Employed

  Aug 2006 - Present

  I've always been a writer. As a child, a documentary on Animal Planet about prairie dogs moved me so much that I wrote a story from a prairie dog's perspective. Before that, I wrote a heartwarming tale about a kitten surviving in the wild until it found a home with a nice family. Granted, the star of my prairie dog tale lost his best friend and mother to the type of plague known to wipe out prairie dog towns; I once refer to the entire inhabitants of this town of prairie dogs as "the village people," and later, our prairie dog hero loses his father to a bullet through his head, and his wife to exterminators sent out to eradicate the local prairie dog population. My kitten protagonist found his mother's carcass after starving for three days in the woods, and—despite being a rather feral creature—knew what a veterinarian was, but not a hair comb.My skills as a writer have vastly improved since then, though my happy endings are still bittersweet and my dark streak has probably gotten darker. I think this is why World War II has always appealed to me.I discovered my interest in WWII in the seventh grade. However, I didn't comprehend the depth of my interest until a couple years later. I watched Night and Fog in college and it affected me greatly. I started looking for WWII fiction, but could never find what I was looking for; that's when I knew I had to write it. So I did.Then, I wrote another.And another.And another.I place high priority on developing my characters so that you either love them, or love to hate them. I strive to make their worlds believable and their emotions and experiences relatable. I want my books to be the reason someone stays up reading into the early morning hours because they just can't put it down. I want my pages to be soaked in readers' tears and lined with pencil marks under quotes they want to remember. I don't see the point in writing at all unless it makes you feel something real.