I’ve been writing on the internet on-and-off since 1998. (Before that I wrote in the shower.) In 2008, just after the end of the watershed election season, I started a blog, Cottage Industrialist, to document my adventures in handmade design and homemade food. I continue to write there occasionally about crafting a homemade life in the digital age. Cottage Industrialist is also the name of a line of fabrics I design.

In 2011, I took up swimming, biking, and running after pretty much a lifetime of sloth. I document my adventures in early-middle-aged fitness at CamRuns.

Occasionally, I get riled up about things enough to go on a rant that doesn’t fit well into my shiny-happy craft blog. I sometimes put that stuff here, other times at Brazen Wussy. Other times, I bury those thoughts in a notebook under a rock in the pond behind our house so that I can still have friends and be welcome at family functions.

My incomparable husband and I raise our lovable Jedi-Pirate-Lego-Engineer son in the South Carolina town where we both grew up. We love it here, but we both secretly pine for our other hometown of Los Angeles (secretly, because it is a town everyone loves to hate), where we fell in love and lived out the best parts of our 20s.

When I am not writing or drawing or concocting or fomenting, I am a criminal defense lawyer of the public defender variety. But I have also been a line cook at Spago, a screenprinting press operator, a personal assistant to a self-professed internationally acclaimed romantic artist, a computer programmer, a college administrator, a legal writing instructor, and a financial data systems analyst. At this point, I have promised my family that I will never go to medical school. Other than that, all bets are off.

I am a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network, by way of the Liberty Fellowship class of 2013. I am totally out of my league and am just hoping against hope that no one in charge will figure that out.

As of 2013, I have a novel, a play, and a very messy life in progress.