About the Author

I'm a writer. I don't get paid for it, and I don't get a lot of time to do it. But I do it, and I love it. So as far as I'm concerned, that makes me a writer.

Official writer stuff.

Before I became a stay-at-home mom, I did get paid to write. Sort of. In college, I was a writing tutor. I worked one-on-one with university students doing independent studies in fiction writing for college credit. Talk about a dream job! Then I graduated, and I became a technical writer for a software company. Now, some people might just love software to death. Me, I couldn't handle stare at spreadsheets and workflow diagrams day in and day out. And editing programmers' terrible grammar? I had to get out. Now I write fiction during nap time. Sometimes fantasy, sometimes sci fi, sometimes something else.

I can't seem to find any pictures of me writing, so here's a beach shot.

Now I like to NaNo. National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is a writing challenge, and not for the faint of heart. Every November, writers are challenged to write a novel (or at least 50,000 words of one!) in one month. That's 1667 words a day, every day, for an entire month. If you're a writer, you understand the enormity of such a task! If you're not a writer, that's approximately 6.5 double-spaced, typed pages a day. Sounds crazy, right? Crazy awesome. I've participated in Nano in 2011 and 2012, plus several of their scaled-down summer versions.

Now, I don't want to talk about my success rate. Let's just say I've completed this challenge in the past. And I'm going to tackle NaNo '13 with the same sparkling optimism I start every session with!

What fun is a quest without obstacles? Two obstacles, to be precise.

This year, I've decided to blog about my NaNo experience and post my work-in-progress because writing 50,000 words isn't enough work! Excuse me while I take a short laugh.... But I have a competitive steak in me, and if I have people reading over my shoulder, I will be twice as motivated to find time to write!

So if you're here, I'd love to hear your comments, critiques, and encouragement! I have a thick skin, so please feel free to drop your constructive criticisms and opinions on me! Swears, flames, and anything unnecessarily rude will be deleted, but otherwise, knock yourself out!