About Me

I have only a single memory from before I learned to read. I am in the backseat of the car, going down a highway on a dark night, and I think it is raining outside. My forehead rests against the cool glass of the window as a large neon sign in primary colors flashes past. I recognize the shapes as letters, but I don’t yet know what the letters add up to. “Someday I’ll be able to read that,” I think, and my smugness knows no bounds.

The next thing you know I’m trying to teach myself cursive letters, but failing to realize that the point of cursive is to join all the letters in a word. I tried teach myself Latin from a book in my high school library, but had to settle for French. I took classes on classical Greek and — finally — Latin in college, because they didn’t offer Italian. I still want to learn Italian, but I went to graduate school and studied comparative literature and Finnish instead. I realized over time that I can still keep all these words and grammars separate on paper, but whenever I try to speak any one of them all the others start tumbling from my tongue as well, like puppies where you can’t take just one of them for a walk without the others going crazy and wanting to come along. Once I tried to converse with a pair of French-Canadian tourists only to lapse into Latin, swear in Finnish, and then beg their pardon in Spanish.

In short, I tend to get carried away. A term paper about Dante probably shouldn’t be prefaced with an epigram from Douglas Adams, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Also:the Iliad has a great deal in common with Toy Story 2. Euripides’ Bacchae and Rocky Horror are worth comparing, but it’ll really knock ‘em dead if you add in the Gospel of John. Later I wrote a paper about Kant, Coleridge, the Romantic sublime, and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. It turns out I have a prodigious talent for misunderstanding Kant. (But have you read the bit of the Critique of Judgment where he talks about aliens?)

My masters thesis dealt with four books: Ovid’s Fasti (epic poetry about the Roman calendar), A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, and Joyce’s Ulysses. There were sections on time, and ships, and ghosts, and books, and on the relationship between the writer, the text, and the reader. Hamlet made a significant cameo appearance, which surprised nobody more than myself.

Now that the ink on my graduate degree has dried, I am finally trying to build a career as a writer after having dreamed of doing so for as long as I can remember. I write romance because I’ve read romance as long as I’ve read anything, and somehow every story idea that falls into my head has a strong romantic element. Why fight it?

Any genre is fair game — at present I have two short erotic romances out from Ellora’s Cave and a third on the way, under the name Olivia Waite. I’m also working on a full-length YA fantasy romance best described as Finnish mythology meets the Arabian Nights. It’s fun. There’s a yeti. In a desert.

I also post occasionally with the fine people over at Ars Marginal, which you should definitely check out. They are all much more clever than I am.

If you can think of anything else I should be writing, please let me know.