I am a writer. I have made up stories all my life. The first story I ever wrote was fifteen words long. It was entitled "The Funny Pig" and went thus: "Once upon a time there was a funny pig. This is it." And underneath there was an illustration in felt-tip pen, showing a pig with green dots and pink stripes. The back of the sheet of paper read, rather appropriately, "short". As a teenager, when I was getting too old to play 'house' or 'farm' or 'orphans get lost in a blizzard but find loving new home in time for lunch' I began to tell myself stories in my head and slowly to write them down.

In primary school, when we were supposed to write a story, I never finished mine. I thought then that I wasn't very good at writing stories. In fact, my stories were simply too huge to be finished by an eight- or nine-year-old with an hour's time. Over the years I grew into writing, and since discovering the miracle and madness that is NaNoWriMo, I know that I can finally write down the novels in my head - beginning to end. By now I have completed a number of novel-length manuscripts, in addition to short stories, novellas and the occasional poem. While I still enjoy inventing places, cultures and languages and using them as settings for my stories, I am a very character-driven writer. It is always the characters that come to me first, and it is their struggles (internal and external) and development that I write about. To find out more about my current writing projects, click on "Writing" above or visit my blog. I am also a translator (German to English and vice versa), and I have an M.A. in cultural anthropology and English literature and linguistics.

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