Toni Scales was born and lives in her native city of Corpus Christi, Texas. Her mother was a home-builder and her father a jazz stand-up bass player. She trained in classical piano from the age of six throughout her early twenties. In early college she played the synthesizer and composed music for a local "psycho-pop" band called "The Violet Hour," after Eliot's "The Waste Land." In high school, she grew obsessed with gothic literature and culture, and even wrote to Bela Lugosi's son. It was during this period she set upon a tentative journey to becoming a writer. Penning poems, short stories, erotica, and even a 400-page novel, she was heavily influenced by the work of Joyce Carol Oates (Bellefleur being her favorite book of all time). She also acted as an interior designer for her mother's model homes, all the while creating her own dark couture: sewing hats out of black roses, velvet, and veils, and prowling the streets in Victorian boots, satin gloves, an enameled cigarette holder, and trailing tulle and taffeta skirts.
Later in life she worked in various funeral homes as a director's assistant, all the while having pursued different majors: Music Composition and Theory, Mortuary Science, and English and Creative Writing. Now the single mother of a beloved 17 year-old daughter named Varity, she prefers to spend most of her time at home with her feisty teenager. Publishing sporadically in online journals, her work has appeared in The Pedestal Magazine, Lily, Wicked Alice, blossombones, Stirring, and Gothic Fairy Tales for Melancholy Children. |