When your childhood stomping ground is restricted to a map-speckle village called Crooksville, you realize at a pretty young age that you are going to have to find the means to entertain yourself. While most people I grew up with found their entertainment at the bottom of a beer bottle and in basic delinquent behavior, I chased mine into alternate worlds, where life wasn’t quite so boring and limitless opportunity existed.
The earliest public reading of my work took place when I was 8 and a totally rad priest read my short story about a non-carnivorous young dragon aloud during his sermon. My first produced work came a couple years later when I wrote and performed a Halloween play with fellow classmates for the kindergarten and first graders in the elementary school library.
Unpopular, as one might expect, during my teen years, I spent them writing and singing in my bedroom and doing major drama, both in school and at home. I was cast as Judy in A Chorus Line in a neighboring town’s theater, rehearsed for weeks, and then lost the part to a bad case of bronchitis and a trigger-happy director.
After high school, I escaped to Nashville, studied music business and went toe to toe with the Baptists, succumbing to their religious intolerance after a year and fleeing their university with my own, heathen morality. Bouncing around from state to state and addictively traveling, I learned my way around numerous cities, discovered which had the best skyline reveal (Cincinnati, OH), where to get the best bread pudding (Fort Smith, AR) and just how close to the road Coloradan elk aren’t afraid to be. I attended several universities, earned a degree in English and Sociology and worked a slew of forgettable office jobs.
In 2005, my first novel, “Bleeding Through Kingdoms: Cinderella’s Rebellion,” was published by Tattered Essence Publishing and became the year’s top seller at a lone feminist bookstore in Oakland, California. In 2006, I produced and directed my first feature film, Drawing on Walls (…and other socially dictated signs of deviant behavior) in 5 frenzied days on a micro-budget.
At this precise moment, I reside in eastern Pennsylvania with my girlfriend, but, as per usual, it’s only temporary. The location. Not the girlfriend.