I’m a 30-something data monkey from a one-stoplight town in western Massachusetts. Reading Beverly Cleary’s Ramona stories and Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking stories in early childhood convinced me I wanted to be a writer, and reading The Hobbit at age ten and several science fiction stories for school assignments a year or two later convinced me that writing about imaginary worlds would be even cooler than writing about the real one. The only time I submitted anything for publication was a poem I wrote at age fourteen; the small literary journal sent me the nicest rejection letter imaginable, though I’m not sure if that’s because they possibly guessed my age, and it’s still somewhere at my parents’ house.

I acquired an impractical degree in a fit of youthful naivete, rewrote and rewrote the first few chapters of a terrible novel I never finished, worked too many different jobs, and moved to Boston for grad school in my mid-twenties. Once I started meeting fun people and not getting lost every time I walked out my door, I fell in love with my adopted city and never left. For years, I wrote little and finished less, thinking my childhood ambition completely unattainable, but early in 2014 I had an early midlife crisis of sorts and agonized over all the things I should have done by now but hadn’t. I decided to try writing again, found a call for submissions for a collection called Damsels in Distress at the Less Than Three Press website, and a couple months later I got my first acceptance letter.

I’m a bit of a loner who’d rather be reading, writing, or playing computer games than partying. I’d be femmier if I weren’t so busy and/or lazy and if I didn’t hate wearing skirts in the winter, but I do like to get dolled up sometimes. I play and occasionally run tabletop roleplaying games. I’m an undistinguished amateur classical mezzo-soprano who also enjoys folk and international music; people tend to be surprised that I’m also a metalhead. There’s a soft fuzzy center beneath my cynical, prickly exterior, sort of like an artichoke. I like art museums, eccentric vegetables, snarking Z-grade movies, and coffee.