I’m eight years old, cross-legged on the stairs inside my local library, the itchy green carpet digging into the bare flesh between my socks and the corduroy pants I’d gotten for Christmas. The giggles of other children ring around me as Robert Munsch perches on a leather armchair, reading from the thin book in his hand. He portrays every character’s voice so perfectly, I’d almost forgotten he was one man, save for his animated shadow flattened on the ground from the sun bursting through the bay window behind him.

I hold my breath and hang onto every word, stunned that the man who’d written so many books I know by heart is sitting in front of me.

My infatuation with Munsch began in the form of a package that arrived in the mail from my aunt, a teacher, who had been reading his books with her class and knew his sense of humor would match mine. I still have the original copies of the books she sent me, our names scrawled inside the covers in her familiar print: To Samantha, love from Aunt V.

The Paper Bag Princess was the first one to take hold of me. I was enthralled by the story of the princess beating the dragon—not just with weapons, but with her wits. When Prince Ronald rejected her after seeing her in a torched paper bag instead of typical “princess” clothes and she realized she was better off without him, I was sold.

I’ve spent my life being told I’m not pretty enough, not thin enough, not worthy of my happy ending because I didn’t conform to what society dictated of me. Princess Elizabeth was the first person to make me realize I was worth more.

Sitting on the freshly vacuumed carpet of the library and hearing that story read aloud by the man who wrote it is a moment that has never left me. That was when I knew I wanted to be an author. I wanted to write books that called to people like me—the outsiders, the ones who were bullied because they were never enough or because they were too much. I wanted to make someone feel like I did when I first read about Elizabeth: powerful and strong and able to create my own happy ending if I didn’t like the one the world expected from me.

This is everything I pushed into Devica in Not Today, Satan. She’s strong enough to speak her mind, but soft enough to be wounded by words alone. She’s not what you’d expect from the daughter of the devil. Meanwhile, Nate is the anti-Prince Ronald: he’s self-deprecating and charming, and he falls for Devica as she is and never expects her to change for him. He wouldn’t care if she was in a ballgown or a paper bag; all he would see is the beauty of her not-actually-there soul.

Thanks to my time in the worlds of Mr. Munsch, there’s also plenty of humor. Because as I listened to the laughter in the library that day, I knew that was also something I wanted to elicit from my readers. There’s nothing like the joy of creating laughter with your words. Especially when sometimes everything seems so dark, laughter is the one thing we can cling to. I owe so much to my library and to Robert Munsch for that day. For all the days I spent on that green carpet with his words or with those of all the other authors I discovered after him. They’d all be the fuel of the fire that lit my devilish little book.

I hope I get to read from it to you someday.

Meet you at the library?

Samantha Joyce became an author because she much preferred writing about other people instead of herself. She lives in Toronto, Ontario, and when she is not writing, she’s baking or beading jewelry or sitting in the audience at Broadway musicals. Her favorite thing in the world is making people laugh, so if you chuckle at least once while reading her books, this bio was worth it.