A picture of me.

If you've come here, I assume it's because you want to know more about me than you can find on the main page of my site. (Or you want contact information, in which case you can avoid the rambling digressions by jumping down to the "Contact" section of this page. Go ahead. Jump on down.)

I'm a web application developer by profession and a writer by vocation. I'm a classic INTP, which means I love systems and details; I didn't go into Lingusitics because of the job prospects*, I went because playing in grammar and word formation were hella exciting fields.

...no, I really thought that. That wasn't a joke, there.

*Though that was a joke, if you were wondering.

I'm a lifelong learner. There's an Oppenheimer quote which goes:

One thing that is new is the prevalence of newness, the changing scale and scope of change itself so that the world alters as we walk in it, so that the years of man’s life measure not some small growth or rearrangement or moderations of what he learnt in childhood, but a great upheaval.

That's the great thing about the age we're in. The sphere of what we know is expanding at an astounding pace, and the sphere of what we know we don't know is expanding even faster. We're constantly on a new frontier. How cool is that?

Fields I love to learn in include languages (human and computer), psychology (especially the psychology of motivation), changing standards of communication and narrative, social construction of race, ability, and gender, and the entire realm of speculative fiction.

I use nonstandard pronouns, which I'm constantly fiddling with. Currently, I'm most comfortable with se/se's/sem(or sen).

Contact

A Random Anecdote

Having grown up and lived most of my life in the Midwest, I was used to winters where the temperatures Fahrenheit would park themselves in the low teens (or below) for weeks on end and stubbornly refuse to budge. Those were the times when we'd talk about it getting up to freezing, and when it did, it felt balmy. We could go outside without hats, and with our coats open.

At some point after I outgrew snow angels and snow forts, I grew to hate winter with a bitter, trudging sort of passion.

Back in October, 2011, my Clarion West class (specifically, my most excellent classmate Pam Rentz) organized a reunion in a San Diego beach house during World Fantasy Con. Being Southern California, and with the Midwest already settling into the long temperature decline, I spent a lot of time on the beach, soaking up sun like a warm-blooded, bipedal lizard as though I could store it against the months ahead.

I think it may have confused my classmates. They decided that I had to be going out there to punch the dolphins.

This is roughly how my story The Relative Densities of Seawater and Blood was born.