You really want to know about me? Okay; but honestly you'll learn more about me by looking at the pictures.
So. That's me, over there on the left. At least, that's what I looked like in 1989. I still look pretty much like that, except now there's some gray in my hair, which is much longer. And I wear it in a braid. And, ummm, I look older. <G>
I was born in November of 1953, and my mother tells me that I started teething on Prismacolor pencils almost at once. I don't remember, really.
But I do remember drawing pictures when I was supposed to be taking notes all through school. I made it through anyway; even got good grades somehow. But all I really wanted to do was draw.
I went to my first Science Fiction convention in the spring of 1972. (It was a Detroit Triple Fanfair.) Being a poor college student at the time, I lacked money for little things like food or a room. But I noticed that other people were selling bad pencil drawings of Mr. Spock, and making enough money to live at the show. So I said to myself, "Self, I can do bad pencil drawings of Mr. Spock!" So I did. And the next thing I knew I was a Con Artist.
I graduated from Michigan State University in 1976 with a degree in Special Education for the Visually Impaired, and started teaching in Kentucky that same year.
Two years later I moved to Washington DC with a man I eventually married, and had to stop teaching. (He was in the Army, and no one would hire an Army dependent to teach. Something about leaving in the middle of the school year! <g>)
We went to Okinawa, Japan in 1980, and were in exile there until the very end of 1982. By early 1983 I had gotten my first professional commission; doing the character cards for the Mayfair game, Dragonriders of Pern.
From there, I started to do a lot of stuff for Mayfair, and in 1985 I got my first Dragon magazine cover. At the same time, I started to do book covers for Llewellyn Publishing.
In 1987, the year that my marriage broke up, I did a picture of Robinton from Anne McCaffrey's world of Pern, and (with a lot of help from Annie) that blossomed into the book People of Pern.
After that I did the Robin Wood Tarot Deck, and just kept busy doing things for TSR and Llewellyn, and the odd bit for a convention or a private collector until 1993, when I got the flu and couldn't seem to get over it.
My problem was diagnosed as a little condition called Fibromyalgia in '95, and as it got worse I gradually cut back on the art, until I found that it was time to call it quits, and pack the studio away.
I did all my work on the computer until early 2005, when I finally pushed the fibro into remission. (I used a combination of Meditation, Yoga, biofeedback, and singing. It was the singing that finally seemed to do the trick. I grew a lot spiritually during those 12 years, and learned to like myself better. That helped as well, I'm sure.)
So I'm drawing again, although so far it's all been sketches and things I've been scanning into the computer to do more work on. (There's no room to set up a painting studio in the home we are now living in.) Still, it's a huge relief to simply be able to draw again!
While I couldn't paint, I also started writing books. I've done one about Ethics from a Wiccan/Pagan perspective, one about my Tarot deck, and worked on three about LightWave. There are several others in the various stages of progress. Keep an eye on the site to learn more about them.
On the home front, I re-married in 1990, and my husband Michael and I were joined in 1999 by Laura (sometimes known as Skyia,) who is an incredibly talented woman. Among many other things, she is a massage therapist and engineer. I can't tell you how handy it is to have an engineer around the house. <g>
We currently live in Westland, Michigan with our two cats, two snakes, seven computers, and occasional calls from my two stepsons; Tony and Tim, who are now grown and on their own. (Tony married Joy, who already had 3 children, and they had another in March of 2005. So I'm a grandmother 4 times over now!)
Thanks for reading this, and feel free to look through all of the other stuff on my site!
