Who Am I?

Hi, my name is Shaina Krevat. I used to work for Google, which was a dream come true, and write in my free time, but after many years of that I realized I had let many of my passions fall by the wayside. I was fortunate enough to be able to leave my job and pursue creating full time!

I’ve been writing since I was about twelve. I started out writing stories that were thinly veiled attempts at creating fun adventures for my friends, and gradually grew out of that and into telling fantastical tales. My goal was always to be published, in fact I originally wanted to set the record for youngest traditionally published author ever. That obviously didn’t happen, but in the intervening years I’ve learned a lot about writing and how your work grows with you, which I discuss on my blog.

Nowadays, if I’m not writing, I’m hanging out with my beloved dog, Atlas, keeping in contact with my friends, or inventing fun new recipes. You can follow my social media by clicking the links below, or keep reading for more of how I got here.

My Story

I was, apparently, a very creative kid. I used to tell my mom stories and she would write them down for me. I’m fairly certain they weren’t good stories, but it showed a penchant for creating that made her proud. My dad used to improvise stories for me instead of traditional bedtime stories. I can still remember one about a magic talking fish, and another one about an elephant. He would ask me what should happen next, and I’d jump in with a suggestion.

Middle school is when I started writing my own stories. One of my best friends had started writing Harry Potter fanfiction, and after that, an original story. I enjoyed reading her writing so much that I wanted to do it too. The book I wrote wasn’t very good, but I learned a little bit of what not to do.

I started writing short stories which continued through high school. I focused on character studies, and they were usually about people in our modern day world, as opposed to having any fantasy elements. Looking back, I think these stories were the initial building blocks of my current writing style. They had a focus on word choice and flow, lots of descriptions of people and setting, and each had a penchant to reveal information slowly with a big twist at the end.

In high school I started making movies and acting in a theater conservatory. At the same time, I switched over to writing musicals, short films, and plays, both about fantastical worlds and real ones. I actually got to direct one of the plays, a comedy about a couple trying to get engaged that I wrote with my sister, for a one act festival at my high school. It was such a rush to see my words come to life, although for the first couple performances my heart was in my throat from the nerves.

At the very end of high school I took a creative writing class, and that’s what changed my life forever. We were required to do a final project that we worked on the whole semester, and I thought, “I’ve been writing musicals and plays for a while, maybe I should try writing a book like I did in middle school. But better.”

And thus, Children of Balderhill was born. I worked on CoB, as I called it, all throughout college. I was determined that this was going to be the book that I would publish, garner fame and fortune, and talk about on the Ellen DeGeneres Show. It was a medieval fantasy, coming of age young adult series with dragons and magic and betrayal. I learned a lot while writing Children of Balderhill, but once I graduated college and started a full time job, I realized the project didn’t work for me anymore. I loved it, and I was proud of the world I had built, how much I had learned about fight scenes to the point that readers complimented them, and how my writing style had grown and developed as I edited. But after I set it aside and came back to it, I realized it would take a great deal of re-working to bring it to a publishable level. So I decided to put it on indefinite hiatus and start something new.

At the end of 2016, I was floundering creatively. I had given up on Children of Balderhill, but I didn’t have another project to start on. I had a lot of conversations with friends, and my sister, before someone suggested short stories instead of a daunting novel. That struck a chord with me, because I was reminded of the short stories I used to write in middle school, and that one of my friends (the same one, in fact, who had written the HP fanfiction) had written some fascinating short stories in her college creative writing class. I started brainstorming some new characters, and by the end of the night, Gertie and Bridget and Ziggy of Tales of Mundane Magic came into being.

The first tale of mundane magic was posted on my blog on Christmas (which, looking back, wasn’t a great release date to get a lot of views) and after posting two volumes (twenty-three stories), I began the process of self-publishing them as well. I thought of posting on my blog as sort of like an episode coming out on cable, and the compiled volumes as DVD releases. Volume Three was a struggle to produce, as the 2020 pandemic began in the middle of the publication process, but I managed to push it through.

While creating YouTube videos again has been amazing, I am keen to release more writing! Volume Four is in the works, and I have some non-Tales of Mundane Magic projects coming afterwards, and I’m sure I’ll be making videos about what I’m writing.

I can’t wait for you to see it all!