was born.

y mother spent the next eight years attempting to get through the days without a) pinching my little head off, or b) going bonkers.  Then, overnight, she swears, I turned thirty.  No adolescent drama, just--zip!--and I seemed to have grown up at the tender age of nine. 

had three older brothers, and I was a tomboy and a loner, having spent my first decade running through the Florida backwoods, happily barefoot and dirty.  I read incessantly (still do).  Heinlein, Kipling, Jack London--anything that involved adventure, high ideals, independence, courage.  Junior high was an unmitigated social disaster.  Remember that kid everybody picked on?  That was me.  High school was a little better, as I discovered the geek crowd and took on a new persona, half flower child, half geek.  The geeks were all smart, of course, all odd, and I fit right in, though I peformed poorly in school, earning A's in what interested me and F's in what did not.  Grades seemed arbitrary and pointless (still do).

attended university, a physics/computer science double major.  I wanted to fly aboard the Space Shuttle, but I didn't turn out tall enough, and since physics grads too often took jobs with defense contractors, inventing better ways to kill other human beings, I turned away before long.  A couple years of vacillating lead to a firm decision to finish a degree in some branch of science--and a disconcerting lack of funds (and, though I had family who would have helped me, if I'd asked, I was stubbornly putting myself through school and would not ask).  I took a quick degree in education, planning to leverage a steady paycheck and summers off to procure the second degree in something with intellectual teeth, something I could use to help the world.  High zoot biology, perhaps; the pesky problem of mortality needed attention. 

ut so did other things.  Like my students, my housework, my cat, my boyfriend (who soon became my husband), my children....  

've never gone back for that second degree.  But, though Life got in the way of school, it has not interfered with my education.  I've never stopped learning.  Ever creative, I plunged into writing.  Painting.  Piano.  Sculpting.  Web Design (I'm responsible for my own site and have earned a shekel here and there as a web designer).  Along the line, I procured and discarded a real estate license, maintained my teaching certificates, and wrote seven novels.  I still read a lot, non-fiction, mostly (I've got a nasty inner editor I can't shake, that renders much fiction irritating), a pastime at once exciting and frustrating, as the pace of discovery has increased such that even major advances are become impossible to keep up with, and I especially love evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cosmology, the push toward negligible human senescense, and the disconcerting-yet-exciting concept of Singularity.

comfort myself with the thought that I've yet managed to make the world a better place.  I've penned seven published stories, mind-candy that allowed my readers to escape for a while the stresses of their lives.  I've created art that makes people smile and feel happy inside.  And I've brought two intelligent and happy children into the world, who have every chance of improving the world themselves.  And, perhaps, when they've fledged, I'll go back to school....

hese days, I run my own company, The Brazen Eye, through which I sell my original art online.  

homeschool my children, wear no make up, go barefoot a lot, find beauty in common things, go orienteering and kayaking, tinker with guitar and violin, and learn just for the joy of it.

y interests include polyamory, secular humanism, hang-gliding, budgies, African violets, Asperger's syndrome, India, Caribbean history, all sorts of science, and the television show Survivor (to which I've applied five times, and just when will you Survivor folk come to your senses and see that I'm persistent ~and~ great potential TV, huh?! :-o ;-) ).  I'm a Meyers-Briggs INTP, and I'm extremely experiential, having tried everything from river rafting to sailing, to flying a plane, and I thrive on challenge.

ome is near Orlando, Florida, USA, and I share it with my beloved husband, two young daughters, and three little feather-people, our budgerigars.  And my mother still wants to pinch my head off from time to time.

hose are the facts.  But who am I, really? 

ne day, while rafting in a group of six boats, one of our guides announced that we were about to enter a rapid just gentle enough to allow us to slip into the water and take the rapids sans raft.  Two seconds and I was out of that boat, the only one of thirty people who took him up on the suggestion.  I think that's a good metaphor for my life.  I'm going to live until I die.