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. If you’ve read Hardly Perfect, or have a note of praise for Christine, drop her a line via the “Comments” link below.