Elizabeth Flock was obsessed with the news. As a correspondent for CBS News, she traveled the world to feed her hunger for the big story of the day. The handover of Hong Kong from British rule back to the Chinese, the historic meeting between Pope John Paul II and Fidel Castro in Havana and London's reaction to the death and funeral of Princess Diana — Flock covered them all. In between there were plane crashes, race riots, floods and famine. Few knew that while she was jetting from one breaking news story to another she was battling clinical depression.

Network correspondents will be the first to report the personal sacrifice that's made to follow the story, to beat the competition. Marriages crumble, children grow estranged, friendships wither. Few, though, talk about the inward struggle to stay sane in the middle of chaos. Elizabeth's first novel, But Inside I'm Screaming, takes the reader into a fictionalized fight for sanity.

Soon after returning from living abroad in London, Elizabeth landed in San Francisco reporting for both TIME and People magazines. While she was at TIME her work included several cover stories, one investigating Chinese gang activity, another on the current movement toward the preservation of marriage, a third on the fiery siege at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. For People, Flock covered many Bay Area stories, among them the Ellie Nesler story of a mother who shot and killed the man suspected of molesting her son. After five years of print reporting, Elizabeth was drawn to television. Soon she was anchoring and reporting at a 24-hour cable network based in San Francisco and writing for the NBC-affiliate news station.

But New York beckoned, and after a freelance stint covering the crash of TWA Flight 800 for CBS, she was hired, handed a beeper and cell phone and began working on the ulcer that would ultimately slow her down and change her life.

By 1998, Elizabeth knew she could no longer make the sacrifice required of a rising network star and instead chose the peaceful life of writing. But Inside I'm Screaming (MIRA Books, September 2003) is her first novel about a successful journalist's sensational collapse into mental illness and her gradual path toward recovery. Flock's second novel, Me & Emma (MIRA Books, March 2005), is the tale of an endearingly precocious child and her determined fight to put the pieces of her fractured childhood back together. North Carolina is the setting for this extraordinary novel, which is by turns poignant, disarming and bittersweet.

After GA, Liz graduated with an English degree from Vanderbilt University. She is married, has two stepdaughters and lives in Chicago. Liz is currently working on her third novel.