About Me

Me? (Yes, me.)

Look, it's me! (The keen-eyed will note my preferred science fiction skulking in the background.)

I'm a writer and editor based in Olympia, Washington, where I tend to hide from the outdoors and hiss at the sun. It's a difficult role to play in a part of the country that is in love with outdoorsy things like hiking (the horror!), but nevertheless I persist.

I'm a character-driven writer, so relationships between individuals and with oneself are at the core of my work. I'm drawn in particular to exploring the hows and whys that make humanity tick. (This is probably why I find Star Trek's explorations of what it means to be human through artificial life forms especially interesting!)

Full disclosure: I am terrible at titling things I'm working on (my writing folder is full of CharacterName.doc files...) and would welcome suggestions for alternative titles.

I'm fascinated by intricacies of negotiating agency and power, increasingly in cases where a character is both a woman and disabled in some way in a world where brute force tends to rule. How do you negotiate those identities? How do you claim that power? How do you hold on to it? What do you do when challenged, when you can’t overpower an opponent? How do you draw people to you, to support you, and how do you keep them there? How do you ensure loyalty? There are no easy answers, but exploring the possibilities makes for a deeply interesting exploration of human behavior.

My identity as a woman with a disability has had a significant influence on my writing—in early years precisely because I tried to pretend it didn't exist! My early writing attempts showcase flawless Mary Sues who could do everything that I couldn't, who could go on the adventures I never could. I wrote who I wanted to see on the page . . . and that was not me.

I'm delighted to say that in the last twenty years I've managed to finesse that approach (yeek, imagine if I hadn't!). Over the years, as I ran up against obstacles and trekked onward despite the never-ending presence of disability, I became more and more drawn to damaged, flawed, fragile characters. The older I get, the stronger the draw becomes—but it's only been recently that I have begun to engage directly with disability in my writing. 

My writing skitters from genre to genre—YA, dystopian, science fiction, historical fantasy, Regency romance, women's fiction, steampunk. I write the setting that I need to explore character and relationships and so tend to skew towards dystopia, science fiction, and fantasy because of the way these worlds exert unusual pressures on the people living in them.

I still write the characters I want to see on the page—but what I once saw as my weaknesses, to be avoided at all costs, I now see as my strengths as a writer. Hurray!

Cimorene (aliases Little Floof, Demon Child)

Phryne (aka Fluffypants, Giant Floof)

I lived in California for eight years, Illinois for three, and the UK for eight. I spend most of time these days tucked up in a home office with a blankie and two extremely fluffy cats, which, let's be honest, is about as close to heaven as you can get.