Hardly Perfect Writer Pretty Amazing

Christina Anderson, an elementary education and mathematics major and first- year student in the honors program, obviously has a head for math. She’s also an accomplished novelist. Her first novel, Hardly Perfect, recently entered the quarterfinals in the Amazon Breakthrough Novelist Award Contest’s young adult/romance category.

Anderson says she wrote the novel five years ago. “However,” she claimed, “I wasn’t pleased with the way it turned out the first time around, so I scrapped it and didn’t look at it again for another two years.” For the past four years, she’s been participating in National Novel Writing Month, a competition to write a 50,000-word novel in just 30 days. In 2008, she decided to revisit and rework Hardly Perfect as part of the competition.

A novelist and math wizard? What an unlikely combination. “Since I’m an elementary education and mathematics major,” Anderson noted, “my studies basically revolve around those two topics. However, I always try to find ways to better my writing. I now work as a tutor at the Center for Writing_, and I have already learned so much from everyone there.

“A lot of people find it strange that I like both math and writing - the two disciplines seem to be on opposite ends of the spectrum. Writing is very creative and subjective, whereas math is very concrete - there’s not much room for interpretation. So, I like having that balance; there’s a freedom for me to move around with writing, but I know whether or not I have the right answer with math. That equilibrium really appeals to me.”

Pretty amazing.