When Aileen Fish was eight or nine, she told the mom next door that she wanted to be a writer, but she hated writing her stories down. At twelve, she wrote her first novel after reading The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. Well, she wrote most of it. That writing it down part got in the way again.

Aileen's early works as an adult included a parallel-world Young Adult fantasy based on Native American mythology, which she wrote with the help of Ray Faraday Nelson in the Writer's Digest Novel Writing Workshop. Her short fiction at that time was primarily dark fantasy, and her first sale was "Saturday Night" in the Summer 1991 issue of After Hours Magazine.