About Me

I’m a librarian who launched a lifelong dream by Googling, “how to write a novel,” on a slow afternoon at work (in the immortal words of Dave Barry, we are not making this up). That fateful afternoon happened almost a decade ago, but I’ve been writing since about 5th grade, when I decided that since Marcia Brady had a diary, I needed one too. I journaled through high school and college, filling cheap spiral notebooks with whiny angst about whatever rock star or classmate I was crushing on. Eventually I became an academic librarian and, under my legal name (which–spoiler alert–is not Janet Alcorn1) wrote journal articles and even co-edited a real, actual, honest-to-goodness book.

But I’d always wanted to write fiction. I just never believed I could. A disastrous attempt at a short story in high school convinced me I had no talent, and I was enough of a sucker to believe that talent was inborn, and you had it or you didn’t, and I didn’t. And so I approached age 50 with one huge unfulfilled dream.

Unfulfilled dreams have a way of nagging at a person.

One of my high school English teachers left a comment on one of my Facebook posts, encouraging me to write more. A colleague bought me a copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and said I should write a novel. I read about how famous authors launched their careers.

And I kept dreaming. Till that slow afternoon at work, when I typed in the Google search that would change my life.

Why yes, I am being overdramatic. I’m a writer. It’s kind of my thing.

Since launching my writing career with a lame-ass Google search, I’ve published several short pieces, some of which have won awards. I’ve also drafted two novels, both of which are stuck in Revision Hell. See my Writing page for details on all my work.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you. Thank you for visiting my site and taking the time to learn more about me. I hope you’ll stick around and join me as I live my dream.

  1. Why do I write under a pseudonym? Would you want to discuss some Very Important Academic Library Issue across a conference table from someone who had read one of your sex scenes? Yeah, didn’t think so.