From the time I was a small child, I wanted to read. My mother tells stories of when I was a preschooler, not yet allowed to go to school, but unable to conceive that my older sister was learning what I was not yet allowed to learn. I hounded her until she started teaching me to read herself, sitting at the kitchen table.  

As the years went on, my love for reading grew. By the time I was in 7th grade, I was visiting my school library every morning, reading in my classes after finishing my assigned work, and finishing the book at home that evening. By 8th grade, I had to check out two books each morning, or I would run out of reading material before my last class of the day ended. In high school, I would walk across campus with my nose buried in a book, trusting in fate to keep me away from danger as I refused to waste a moment that could be spent reading.

Reading is my passion, my escape, and my path to education. Books are gateways to other worlds--real and imagined; utopian and dystopian; past, present, and future. They are windows into the souls of writers. They provide relief from everyday life, as well as the potential to make everyday life better.

I love books of all kinds, although my favorites tend to be speculative fiction. Science fiction, fantasy, a blending of the two--it doesn't matter; I just love worlds that aren't, or that aren't yet. Sometimes I get cravings, though, for historical fiction, contemporary fiction, memoirs, science, or history. My monthly book club is my happy place, because it introduces me to new books, books that don't necessarily call to me, but that provide a fresh perspective and, sometimes, unexpected enjoyment.

Reading so many books gave me a broad vocabulary from an early age. It also gave me an intuitive understanding of grammar, sentence structure, and writing style. Those instincts were honed in high school, when I took an English class from a teacher known as "The Comma Queen." I am indebted to her for the formalization of my instincts, for the understanding that punctuation matters just as much as words do, and for the detailed exercises that cemented that knowledge. Mrs. Tomlinson, you are still one of my favorite teachers.

I started writing in elementary school--childish stories that I never showed to anyone. In high school, I started to realize that although I loved reading stories, I preferred writing essays. I enjoyed the clarity that came only when I distilled my thoughts and opinions into a form that made sense to others. Writing had a way of revealing to me the structure of my own thoughts: inconsistencies, unexamined assumptions, and unexpected connections screamed from the page after lurking unnoticed in my thoughts.  

In college, my friends started asking me for help with their papers. I never wrote their papers for them--I valued education too much to deny them the opportunity for their own learning--but I would proofread their work. At first, it was difficult for me to separate my own writing style from theirs; I would make corrections because "it just sounds better." Later, I learned to recognize the difference between an error and a stylistic difference, and I continued correcting the former while leaving the latter alone.

In graduate school, while working toward my Master of Arts degree in psychology, I exasperated my professor. He would give me a manuscript he had written for submission to a research journal, expecting me to critique his methodology, analysis, and conclusions. His spelling and grammar were horrendous though; he didn't edit his work for those errors because he counted on the journal's editors to do that. He never understood why I couldn't just overlook those errors to focus on the content; I never understood how he expected me to see the content through the errors. I would return his papers full of editing marks, with just a few questions or comments about the methodology, analysis, and conclusions. Eventually, I realized that, despite my interest in psychology, it couldn't hold a candle to my passion for words.

I met my future husband in high school, although we didn't start dating until my senior year of college. I was in graduate school before it became clear that we wanted to stay together for a lifetime. By that time, he had begun a career path that would require him not only to live overseas, but to move to a different country every few years. Ideally, his family would move with him--and I was ready for the adventure.

Several years and a wedding later, the day came. We hopped a flight and moved to Egypt. During our 3 years there, our family expanded--first with the adoption of our two cats, and later with the birth of our daughter. After Egypt, we moved to Cambodia, then Kosovo. Then came Greece and Kuwait, where we lost one of our Egyptian cats to old age. Finally, we moved to Kenya, where we are now. We intend to move back to the United States when our time in Kenya is over, but we aren't certain how long we'll stay there.   

When we first moved to Egypt, I started a blog to keep our families informed about our adventures. I wrote, with varying levels of consistency, until about halfway through our time in Greece. That blog was my outlet, my way of processing the strangeness of our lives. Sometimes I wrote about daily life overseas, sometimes about unusual events or about things I'd seen in the news. Sometimes I would have an inkling that I wanted to write about a particular topic, but wouldn't feel inspired to do so--until suddenly, a blog post came to me, fully formed, and I couldn't think about anything else until I'd gotten the words out and onto my computer screen. I stopped writing, on the blog and everywhere else, during a time when I was struggling with loneliness and sadness. I realize in retrospect that my lack of interest in writing at that time was a symptom of depression and that I would have been better served to have continued processing my thoughts and emotions through the written word. Nevertheless, I stopped writing for several years and started again only after we moved to Kenya.

Unlike on my old blog, my family life is unlikely to come up much on this site, out of respect for my husband's and daughter's privacy. However, my family is my first priority. They, and our nomadic life together, simply could not be left out of a page about me.