A Brief Bio

First, and primarily, I am a writer.  I went to school to better my writing, and stories are what tend to occupy the majority of my brainpower. At any given time, a large handful of characters are running about in there, going about their daily lives, with very little input and control from me.

Yes, I realize that sounds like some sort of mental disorder, but no, it just means I’m a writer. It doesn’t matter, really, what I spend my 9-to-5 doing or whether I ever manage to make a nickel or a million dollars at it. Writing isn’t something you just do, not if it is to produce anything meaningful. When you are a writer, you just are.  The writing becomes like breathing. You can’t not do it.

That said, I do get the occasional bit of cash, and I do get published, here and there, but I have to eat, too, and I have four cats who really have to eat. Right now. I mean it.  Fill that bowl, you dirty human!

…Ahem. So, the whole romantic starving artist thing doesn’t work very well if you want to do that eating thing.  I have a job. An ordinary job for just-enough-pay and a wonderful boss.  I have a family and a boyfriend who are all peculiar  in that way that all families and all boyfriends tend to be.  I have a house, and I have those cats, who are also all very peculiar, as all cats tend to be.

I am also a gamer. A girl gamer. And a girl geek. You can pick your jaw up now, we’re not as strange or rare as you might think. Men don’t have a monopoly on geekiness, or, for that matter, on being able to blow people away on Halo.

I am that girl who can tell you why your computer is running too slow and fix it, who knows her gigabytes from her Google and can explain to you what a D20 is used for, why X-Men comics are an analogue of the civil rights movement (and now the gay rights movement), and just how, exactly, Star Trek qualifies as an example of existentialism.

My first gaming systems were a Commodore 64  and an Atari. I was among the first generation of gamers who genuinely grew up playing video games in their own home.  There had been games before, in mega-arcades and the like, but we were the first gamers to actually have them at the ready when we got home, who could use them as an interactive alternative to television for our at-home entertainment.

And of course, when I finally was able to buy my first computer and convince my mother to get me hooked up to the internet (ah, the nostalgia for the song of the dial-up modem…), I created my first webpage with HTML in the days before webpage creators, MySpace, or FaceBook were around to give relative novices the ability to create sites with no know-how.  The “MMORPGs” then were text-based telnet MUDs, MUSHes, and MOOs, and served as the perfect transition from tabletop RPG gaming to computer gaming.

And I write. Constantly and always. It’s not really something I can stop doing. Most of what I write would qualify as genre fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, steampunk, cyberpunk, etc.), but I intersperse some nonfiction and poetry in there when I’m in the mood. I also read constantly, books of nearly every genre and category that’s out there.

For more information on my career, feel free to jump over to my Resume, or to read some of the things I have written, take a look at my writing portfolio.