This site has been up for a number of years now and, as somebody pointed out recently, it's never been about me. I don't intend to change that. (There are all together too many homepages which serve only one purpose--to describe and glorify the creator of said page. If I wanted to know that much surface crap about so many people I could browse ads on the single's line all night instead of running my internet connection.)

However, I know it's always nice to read about the authors of stories we've read, and I've gotten a lot of questions from readers like: How old are you? Where are you from? Who's your favorite author? So I'll take one little corner of this page to answer a few of those questions, without getting too profoundly personal (this is a public domain, not a confessional) or including too much stuff that no one in their right mind would want to read.

As of this writing, I'm 19 years old. I'm from Louisville, Kentucky, which is a livable city but not where I intend to spend much more of my life. I'm a student at Indiana University majoring in linguistics (Ling, for those of you who have never heard of it, is the massive study of spoken language) and specializing in accents. I also have a minor in Russian and East European Studies, and another in film studies. Fall of 2001 will be my third year. I have one sister, two parents, two dogs - Mercy, a golden retriever, and Forni, a Springer Spaniel - and three cats--Shoshoney, Tarzana, and Raeshel, better known as "Shoney, Bwada, and that little cat." My only experiences outside the U.S. have been a trip into Canada, where I kissed the ground in a parking lot and then drove back to Michigan, and a longer trip to Romania. I can't really explain my attraction to Romania, so I'll just thank Deborah Wilson, my mama secunda, for finding a way to take me and securing grant money so that I can go again.

My personal habits include music, I play the violin and the viola; art, I draw, paint, and cross-stitch; television, especially series and A&E documentaries; movies, once it goes to the second run theater I'll see anything; gymnastics and ice skating; and reading, usually about a hundred pages a day. (I know you're thinking: where does she find the time to read all that? As James T. Kirk once said, "If it's important, you'll make the time." And books are important.)

I don't much care for poetry. Exceptions would be Mary Oliver, Claribel Alegria, William Blake, and the wonderful Mihai Eminescu (although if you can't read Romanian I wouldn't recommend Eminescu due to the pitiful translations). My taste in books runs mostly to horror and young adult--I'm happiest when the two combine. I can't pin down a specific author but in the last month or so I've been reading these: K.A. Applegate, Mildred Ames, John Marsden, T.E.D. Klein, Stephen King, Thomas Harris, Rebecca Wells, Beverly Lewis, and Peter Straub. Some of them with more enjoyment than others. I also have a habit of going to discounted book stores (or bins, or shelves, or street sales) and buying as many books as I can for ten dollars, and I pick up all sorts of things at yard sales. I am a firm believer that reading bad books will make me a better writer. As for book recommendations, I can only name funky things that I think you might not otherwise read and which I feel will expand your mind. Here are five:
1)Bongwater by Michael Hornburg. It's a terrible book that will teach you fifty ways to avoid being avant garde.
2)Lord of the Dark Lake by Ron Faust. A story that borders on actual literature but somehow manages to be a page-turner--watch for how Faust develops the main character without describing his motivations.
3)Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis. Despite my misgivings about the ultimate anti-climax that seems to exist in all of Ellis's work, Glamorama is worth sitting through five hundred pages of tiny type for the ambiance, the descriptions, and the lessons in how to keep your reader frantic.
4)Commitment Hour by James Alan Gardner. Gardner is an up-in-coming in sci-fi; he's brilliantly funny, human, and subtle. The moral questions in this book are so hidden that you won't even realize they're there until you try to describe it to someone else.
5)The World on Blood by Jonathan Nasaw. One of my top five vampire books of all time. Nasaw took the genre in a whole new direction. Is this story a satire, a commentary on American drug culture, an acid trip? Do we care? It's a delight. (A note of warning: Don't read the sequel, it's awful and destroys the first book.)

My own writing habits are simple. I write at night at a computer in my bedroom with dim lighting and low volume music. I prefer white words on a blue screen and Bookman Old Style font. I usually work for two to three hours at a stretch three or four nights a week. Sometimes more, sometimes less. However, I've recently purchased a laptop and will probably begin working outside soon, at night on the porch. After a long time writing nothing but fan fiction I've come back to original work. My obscenely obese NW series is being brought to a close and I have an original novel on the drawing board. It's a bugger of a book and giving me fits. I never read "How-to" books about writing--they bore me, but I do keep a dictionary, a thesaurus, and the "Howdunit" series on hand. Most of my larger works require notes for me to look back on, and part of each story is the development of these "novel notes," where I keep geographical, biographical, development, and purely secretarial notes.

Hope that answers some of your questions. If you happen to go to Indiana and want to get together some time at the IMU, drop me a note at [email protected] and stick "IU" in the subject line.