Hello World

This blog happens to be started in the midst of a crisis of identity for me. I've just recently graduated college and am finishing one last semester in Washington, D.C. before...what? I'm making the shift from student to young professional. I think that young professional's career will lie in the nonprofit sector, but anything more specific than that I'm still feeling out. In my time I've been a volunteer income tax preparer, a cashier, a library page, a volunteer member of an advocacy event planning committee, I've (wo)manned a booth selling Fair Trade items, and currently I'm working on an internship preparing a novel for publication.

One thing that's remained constant is the fact that I'm a writer. I've written since I could hold a pen--let's be realistic, since I could hold a crayon. I've written since before I could spell (don't we all, though). And I've written for publication since 2009, not counting the Fictionpress and Fanfiction.net accounts I created to share my writing with a nonpaying audience.

I write science fiction and fantasy, and occasionally what a reviewer will describe as horror, to my mock-dismay and secret pleasure (I read Lovecraft at a formative age). I've also a soft spot for love stories, and dabble in romance under a different name. My current project for this year is to finish revisions on my first completed novel, an urban fantasy story in the sense of an OddCon panelist whose name I no longer remember but whose words were, "The city has become the new forest." As the forests I write cannot be found on any real world map, neither can this city. To be fair, the real world cannot be found on any of this city's maps, either. And lots of other things cannot be found on this city's maps, but still share a world with it--there are too many secrets underneath its crystal streets and behind the brass-plated walls of its soaring towers.
(Do you see the Lovecraftian influence? Yes, I prefer the Dunsanian Dreamlands tales to the tentacle monsters. Though the occasional charnel wind that blows out the stars does haunt me.)

My first book, the science fiction novella Aqua Vitae, has been available from WolfSinger Publications for a little over a year now. It has even garnered 4 and 5-star reviews from people who don't know me (with the exception of my sister, Megan, Rysling Winner and all-around literary genius, most of my family aren't that interested in speculative fiction). I'm proud of it with a characteristically hesitant writer's pride, although the thought never ceases to nag me that I really ought to write a second book. Thus I am.

As for other projects, I continue to write short fiction as I have the past four years--in fact, I have plans for several short stories and novelettes that will round out the three or four short fiction series which have evolved over the years. Part of the reason I've finally gone and created a central author's site is so I can link to them in an order helpful to a casual reader who doesn't want to play detective.

I think that about does it for an introduction, as I've said about as much about myself as is appropriate for someone in an identity crisis. Other aspects of me--my (aiming to be intersectional) feminism, my fannishness (fenness?), the philosophy degree I've earned and will certainly use over the course of my life, though not in the conventional 'get a job, buy a car, meet a spouse and produce 2.5 kids' way--will appear as they become relevant.