First things first: I hate tooting my own kazoo, so writing an “About” section is approximately 271.5% more painful than a root canal or a spinal tap. I should know: having now written this section, I’ve experienced all three of these forms of torture. At least with the medical procedures, I had the benefit of anaesthesia.

Born in the home of Frisbees, Erector sets, and the first telephone exchange, I graduated from Yale with a BA in English Language & Literature. Promptly thereafter, I skedaddled from the New Haven, Connecticut area to settle in the United Kingdom for a dozen years, before returning to the US because man, Mexican food still really sucks over there.

I have more postgraduate education than is seemly, with a MA in Television Studies from the University of Bristol; a Postgraduate Diploma in Law/Legal Practice Certificate from BPP Law School in London; and a JD from St. Francis School of Law in Newport Beach, California. I’m now an attorney based in Los Angeles, but over the years I’ve had roles as varied as used bookshop manager, reality television underling, switchboard operator, research fellow for an Ivy League university and the United Nations, coffee slinger, corporate governance counsel for a large pension fund, and, of course, cat mom.

I live in the great and glorious San Fernando Valley with my preancé (shut up, that’s a word) Shane, who puts up with many of my most self-defeating behaviors, and George, the bestest boy cat that ever jumped on anyone’s kidneys at four o’clock in the morning.

Oh! The writing stuff. I’m currently editing my first novel, This Ends Now, and hope to be querying soon. It’s women’s fiction definitely. Probably. Someone once called it “upmarket fiction,” but I don’t like to put on airs too often.

If you are in the mood for non-fiction and suffer from insomnia, may I recommend my white paper for the Yale School of Management, Voting Integrity: Practices for Investors and the Global Proxy Advisory Industry? I also have a creative writing certificate from Oxford University Continuing Education, and am a member of a writing circle that formed out of that experience.

Turn ons: sunscreen; due process; railway timetables. Turn offs: olives (all sorts); frosted lipstick; mean people, because mean people suck.

And now I’d like to disappear backwards into a bush, thank you. If you must, you can find me posting pretty regularly on Bluesky at @thecrumpet.bsky.social, and very, very occasionally at the hellscape that is the Twitterz, at @grapefruitsodas.