So, about me...I've got a MA in political science from the New School for Social Research (NSSR) in NYC, and did most of my graduate level studies in the areas of race and caste systems, slave and ex-slave systems, religion and its impacts on social systems, and historical weirdnesses i didn't understand more generally, which fitted me surprisingly well for both fiction writing and being extremely annoying at parties. While working on my graduate degree, I was also working on what would turn out to be my first trunk novel (well, second really, if you count the one I wrote in high school and that was destroyed in a basement flood in San Francisco...really). Eventually realizing that I was choosing my classes based on whether they'd further my research for my creative writing rather than my (purported) career as a political scientist, I decided maybe I wasn't really as driven to be a professor as I'd thought. I moved from NYC to San Francisco in 1997, and since then have lived in Sydney, Albuquerque, Seattle, San Diego, and finally Portland Oregon. Prior to New York, I lived in Florida, Europe (mostly London, Poland and Prague), Los Angeles area and Eureka, California, so I've always been a bit transient. I blame my father really, as he was a pilot and took perverse pleasure in dragging us across the country in a trailer when he wasn't flying off to exotic locales like St. Louis and Cleveland.

In addition to the writing and traveling and general shiftlessness, I've developed a serious interest in and practice with meditation, and have traveled to India to attend classes with the Dalai Lama after living at a meditation school in Australia for almost a year. I also attended Seattle Film Institute and received their filmmaking certification in 2005.

Over this time, I've written nonfiction articles on graffiti art, meditation and (more recently) Jung's The Red Book and Hunter S. Thompson. I published a children's story by Wonderella Press, worked on a number of short film screenplays as a writer and/or creative consultant, and done a little bit of acting and directing. I published short fiction in webzines, and also began work on what would become Allie's War: Rook, which is now partway done in graphic novel form, complete in novel form...and yet started off as a screenplay, oddly enough.

I've now completed the sequel, Shield, and am working on a middle grade book about something completely different.